fake water
- Thread starterlilflip
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Typing "rain" into the searchbox yields approx. 260 returns: http://www.controlbooth.com/forums/...1871:4wjal6-5aa8&cof=FORID:9&q=rain&sa=Go#901.
One of the most interesting solutions that I have seen for this problem is to buy unfilled gel-caps (like for medicine or blood capsules). Put them in a dispenser above the stage much like a snow drum and drop them. They are light and they sparkle, and when they hit the deck they sound like rain. You can drop them into a container to collect them and the strays can just be swept up.
Drill a bunch of 1/4" holes in a 6" diameter PVC pipe. Fill the pipe with rice. < that's funny I just typo-ed and the sentence said fill the pope with rice.> When you rotate the pipe like a snow drum the rice will fall out and tinkle onto the stage. It's a lovely effect that's been used for years in Singin in the rain. It's a good idea to build a trough area to catch the rice. or use the effect at an act break so you can clean up the stage, but it's a great sound and look.
Use Dereks suggestion and search too. It's a great tool. Now I have to go see if Snow Drum is in the wikki.....
Use Dereks suggestion and search too. It's a great tool. Now I have to go see if Snow Drum is in the wikki.....
That sounds pretty awesome.
I did Wedding Singer a year or so ago for a small-time community theatre with a pretty small budget. Our water drop rig was really incredibly simple - large, old-style bucket with a handle on the top, rigged to two rigid pipes that came down off a batten and attached to one point on the bucket on each side, allowing it to tip up and down. Picture the giant buckets of water you see at waterparks - the ones that fill up with water until full, then dump the water down on the people below.
To drop the water, we simply tied a rope to the handle of the bucket. Right before the water trick, we just lowered in the batten until the rope was where the actress could grab it, and she pulled on it to dump the water down on her. The water only needs to fall for a few seconds at most, and most productions have the actress trigger the water, so this was a pretty simple effect to achieve. And since the scene happens literally seconds before the end of the act, we manually cleaned up the water and struck the bucket (to prevent dripping) at intermission. Just make sure you don't have any moving pieces too close to the bucket!
Having done Wedding Singer, I would say that if you absolutely can't use real water, the effect might not be worth it. It's not a crucial element to the story at all, and if the actress isn't genuinely soaking wet, you've kinda missed the point of the gag.
If you were going to do it without water, however, there are a couple ways you could make it work. I assume that you only want the water to fall tight on the actress, not across the entire stage? Also, you'll probably want the falling water to only last a second or two, as the actress has to sing and dance a moment later. My first instinct would be to assault the actress with lots of light - ideally a whole bunch of tightly focused, obnoxiously bright arc sources pointing down at her - but that's probably not possible. If you can dedicate enough instruments and use a bit of haze, the brightness created by the lights in the air above her could evoke a feeling that something is falling down. How exactly this works would depend on how you chose to use colors, gobos, angles, and all that other "controllable properties of light" stuff.
I also really like Les's idea. Perhaps you can combine the two. If you can do something like he described but make it drop at just the right time, when combined with top lighting and some rotating gobos, this could look really good. However, the problem is that you likely want the "water" to actually be falling *onto* someone, and dropping fishing line (hell, dropping anything - but especially things that may need to be weighted down) onto someone is not a good idea.
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