Good evening everyone and happy 4th of July!
This coming spring is our school’s spring musical. This year it’s going to be In The Heights. My job of course is lighting design and I’m honestly very excited I got a 10 month headstart.
After doing some research I believe that the nightclub scene is one of the key scenes and every nightclub isn’t complete w/o some disco lights (in my opinion, at least).
Now there isn’t a budget set yet but I’ve been looking into some disco lights and the Rotosphere Q3 by Chauvet DJ has really got my attention except for the pricing (yikes!). I’m wondering if anyone in the CB Community has had any experience with using disco lights and could probably
throw some suggestions and ideas my way.
DMX Control would be very nice and the price range shouldn’t be too high. My plan B though would be to have a
mirror ball and have
LED lights aimed at the
mirror ball to reflect some color.
Thanks and please ask some questions if clarification is needed.
@ademhayyu1 Hello Sir! Writing from the perspective of an old geezer who became an "adult" well before the disco era, survived, and is still here to talk about it. If you're looking for an attention getting
effect at likely the lowest cost, allow me to toss out a few comments and leave you to cogitate upon them:
Acquire (Borrow, rent or
purchase) a motorized
mirror ball legally approved for suspension over the heads of performers and / or patrons. You'd like to think all mirror balls would be but you'll discover that's NOT NECESSARILY SO. Some mirror balls are available with motors pre-installed (hidden) within the ball; more commonly mirror balls are sold without motors with motors to support and rotate them sold as optional accessories. The cost continues to rise as you add features such as
DMX controllable variable rotation speed from stopped to fast to faster along with
DMX control of direction of rotation, CW or CCW.
Size of course affects cost and
weight.
You don't necessarily need to hang your
mirror ball within sight-lines, although in your case that's likely part of the look you're going for.
You can hang a ball
up stage of a
border and just above sight-lines with the only advantage being you can light the ball and
reveal its swirling
effect without ever having displayed the ball forecasting its
effect prior to intentionally lighting it. Again, I doubt this will be how you'll choose to use it. Of course, if it suits your purposes, you can always fly a ball out of sight then fly it in, lit or otherwise, as part of a scene change. Again, totally a question of your
theatre's flying facilities and you and your director's desires. You may choose to hang your ball over the audience where its reflected shards of light would
envelope the entire audience theoretically transporting them into the era and your scenic space.
Moving on:
A small 6, 8 or 10 inch ball can be good, especially in cases where you're hanging them totally out of sight, keeping them out of sight, and only utilizing them for the swirling reflections once you've lit and rotated them. Again small balls are cheaper, lighter and likely more available at local party supplies shops in smaller cities. Larger balls, 18, 24 30 inches and LARGER can look impressive, even when just hanging over the
stage (or audience) visible from the moment the
house manager opens doors 30 minutes prior to performance and long before you light and rotate them. The down side to this is patrons will keep looking at the ball wondering when you're going to light it pulling focus from your performers' in any and all scenes leading up to the scene using the ball. Again, totally dependent upon the look your set designer, director and yourself are going for.
Permit me to blather on about the actual lighting of your ball:
- You could
fade up on it or
snap to full in a zero count.
- Many folks choose to light their ball from one angle, often straight on from an
FOH position. It works but you'll likely find it's comparatively deadly dull, been done to death by too many people for too many decades and is a quickly boring 'one trick pony'
effect.
- You'll likely learn multiple lights from multiple angles result in a far more dramatic
effect. Another option is to begin with one light straight on and add more and more from different angles as the scene unfolds and the story-line progresses.
If you're only going to use one light from the front, a good follow-spot irised fairly tight can be a great choice.
- Two lights in contrasting colors with one firing in from each side will illustrate another
effect that many designers never consider; even if the ball is rotating at a constant speed, any speed, when lit from two opposing sides, the shards of moving light will appear to change speeds as the ball rotates,
honest, they truly will; thus: The light / color coming from SR will reflect at a given speed and appear to speed up as it splashes across the cast and set appearing to move faster and faster as the reflections approach SL and suddenly vanish.
Simultaneously, the opposite is true of the light striking the ball from SL, it will move at a given speed when it initially reflects towards SL and will appear to move faster and faster until it suddenly vanishes on SR.
In stark
open white it's a good trick; in two contrasting colors
even better.
Of course you can always add old fashioned, disco-era, motorized rotating color wheels to your two, three, four or more lights devoted to nailing your ball although ten years ago you'd have added
DMX controlled color scrollers and nowadays you'd be going with
DMX controlled
LED sources.
- If one ball is good, two can be better; again, it's all a question of budget, available facilities, and the look(s) you and your co-horts are striving for.
Let's chat about what lamp source(s) to use: If you want to maintain the look of the era, lamps typically referred to as
ACL's, Aircraft Landing Lights, were extremely popular in the disco era. The lamps provided a stark white, tight narrow beam designed to help commercial pilots locate runways and their center lines from miles away and a couple of thousand feet up. Rock 'n
roll and disco lighting folks tripped over themselves to employ
ACL's to pin-point mirror balls and a myriad of other uses. Since
ACL's were designed to be highly resistant to mechanical vibration and to be powered by large commercial jets, they're constructed with small, but thick, rugged filaments designed to operate from
28 volts. LX shops renting to rockers were housing
ACL's in appropriate diameter cans, wiring four in series for four times 28 = 112 volts, powering them with 120 VAC (effectively 30 volts per 28 volt
filament) and enjoying an even brighter, starker, more intense light at the expense of a substantially decreased lamp life. Forgive them, they were largely drug-crazed rockers and the
ACL's were rentals so the lamps suffered the abuse, disco died and the Rolling Stones live on for ever so forgive them their sins as time marches on.
Speaking of time, this
blind guy's been hammering his keyboard for dang near two hours, if this post vaporizes when I hit the 'Post Reply'
button, tears on my keyboard will likely do it in. Let's see, there's so many more hints to be told but it's past 4:30 a.m. and I suspect I've given you at least a couple of points to ponder. Let me quickly aim this towards an ending as I've got about another 30 minutes I need to do for myself then catch a few zZ
Z's before my 8:25 a.m. alarm pries my eyelids open.
If your space has a flown empty pipe available you COULD hang your ball a short distance below the
center line of your pipe, hang a 5, 10 or 14 degree
Source Four on either side of your ball a carefully chosen distance away on either side on the SAME pipe,
power the rotator from one
circuit cabled in from wherever's most conveniently
SAFE and another one or two circuits for your Source Fours.
With proper slack and cable management, this would give you the options to keep the ball out of sight-lines at all times, or fly it in during a scene change lit or unlit. By hanging the ball and it's lights on the SAME pipe you
gain the advantage of being able to alter the height of the pipe with the ball remaining in the same position relative to its lights; you could fly the pipe in to 6' above the
deck, focus the lights, then fly it out to any height with the relationship between the ball and its lamps remaining unchanged. If you end up dealing with 575 or 750
watt incandescent lamps, colored gels and NO scrollers; you could fly the pipe in and change
gel colors with relative
ease several times between rehearsals until everyone's in agreement on final choices. Potentially you could change colors between acts if that suited your purposes.
When I began typing this hours ago, no one else had responded. When I hit 'Post Reply' I may find you've already received a dozen replies. Oh well, such is the life of a
blind touch-typer pounding his keyboard on the internet in the small hours of the night.
Two closing thoughts: When you choose the hanging location of your ball's light or lights, consider, if
practical, not having the shadow of your ball falling within your patrons' sight-lines. The ball and its reflections are the 'magic', NOT a shadow of the ball pulling attention from your, optimistically, stellar
effect. Typically you'd light the ball from both sides with the resulting shadows falling off
stage in the opposite wings or perhaps fire down on your ball from a little higher and bury the shadow
flat on your
stage deck.
ONE IMPORTANT TIP. NEVER fall into the
trap of shuttering or irising too tightly on your ball even though you may be tempted to do so to eliminate its shadow. The MOST important light reflecting off the mirrored surfaces of your rotating ball is the light glancing off its extremities, you'll soon come to realize that no matter how carefully you try, shuttering in EVEN THE SLIGHTEST AMOUNT onto your ball will
dramatically reduce the entire impact of its
effect. As you yourself stated, you've got 10 months; consider begging / borrowing an inexpensive ball AND rotator then invest a few nights hitting it from a variety of angles on a near dark
stage with what ever
ellipsoidal you can muster and carry about wearing a pair of oven mitts while observing the often radically differing results you can achieve by simply lighting your ball from a variety of different angles. Perhaps solicit the aid of an associate or two, try two lights and observe the results yourself from your patron's perspective out in the
house. I strongly suspect you'd learn a number of useful things in the space of two hours.
All the best to you
@ademhayyu1 and never hesitate to post on Control Booth, there are far worse places you could be.
EDIT: Sorry, omitted a word.
EDIT #2: Thank you for your "Likes"
@Swade White &
@JohnD but apparently
@ademhayyu1 didn't care a phuquing
bit for my efforts. Oh well, that's life up here on the net sans the
safety of a net below you.
(Pardon my despicable pun)
EDIT #3: Adding
@LesWilson to my thank-yous.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard