Costume Lighting

LPdan

Well-Known Member
Hello,
We will be doing Little Mermaid in the spring, and the costume designer would like to add lighting to Ursula's tentacles. I'm comfortable with the electrical and control side of things, but wondering what the best light option is for use in a costume. LED tape is an obvious option, but I'm concerned about it holding up with all the flexing. Is EL wire a better choice? Or does it come down to certain brands that hold up? An RGB solution is best, but open to anything.
TIA!
 
Hello,
We will be doing Little Mermaid in the spring, and the costume designer would like to add lighting to Ursula's tentacles. I'm comfortable with the electrical and control side of things, but wondering what the best light option is for use in a costume. LED tape is an obvious option, but I'm concerned about it holding up with all the flexing. Is EL wire a better choice? Or does it come down to certain brands that hold up? An RGB solution is best, but open to anything.
TIA!

Just a heads up the EL wire will have similar flexing issues. My wife did costumes on iLuminate, it was all EL wire and they had spares for every costume and would make repairs during shows. There were probably abusing it more than you will but it isn't the most robust material. She said the most important part was placing it where it would flex the least.
If you want to go into the laser realm there is this stuff; https://www.ellumiglow.com/laser-wire. I saw a version of it at LDI this year, it was quite incredible how bright it was.
 
Fiber optics and a small, bright LED flashlight concealed in the costume somewhere. The stuff is cheap holds up to flexing<but not sharp folds. it's easy to incorporate in to costume, just poke it though and either hot-glue, epoxy, or heat end with soldering iron.
**** edit
I should add: another thing to consider adding to a system like this, would be an "inverse Light-Activated dimmer". I came up with the idea when building some prop Lanterns in the days before wireless dimming. I'm sure there is a battery operated Wireless DMX dimmer our there that might accomplish the same thing but be much more expensive; I know that can be a deal breaker when it comes to smaller theatres and Education. I can look on here or in some old files at home for the wiring diagram but anyone good with electronics should be able to make one of their own design. The basic circuit idea is that you replace what would normally be the potentiometer in a dimming circuit with a circuit that uses a Light activated device <used to be Cadmium Sulfide Light sensor> to drive the voltage going into a small rectifier. The inverse nature of the circuit means the light comes on when the Stage rise get brighter, it goes off when the stage lights go out. You could also used a battery operated wireless relay and turn the lights on/off remotely but you need someone to do it and there would be no dimming up and down merely on/off.
 
Last edited:
You should check out Adafruit's line of what they call wearables,

I was going to link a few interesting items but this post would have been huge! way too much cool stuff.

Michael
 
How long does it have to last? Assuming the tentacles have some stiffness then flexing won't be an issue for a short run. If it has to tour for years then something more durable would be a better choice. 12V LED pixel tape may be the easiest wireless solution. Something like an ESPixelStick and a battery is all that's needed if your console does sACN or Art-Net.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back