I've placed 4 S4's on stage with breakup gobos and filled the stage with haze and I cannot get a good shaft of light to pop through. Are there any tricks or recommendations?
How wide is your beam? A narrow beam always looks more like a shaft of light than a wide beam, even with breakup, but go too narrow and you lose the breakup effect. A long throw will dilute the effect, too. I've had really good effects with a beam angle between 30 and 40 degrees and the gobo focussed fairly sharp, just on the fuzzy side of a hard focus, from about 6-7 metres throw, but even where we had a throw of over 20 metres beams were visible, but we did have to wait for the haze to fill the entire space, not just the stage, and the effect falls off the further from the lantern you are.
Also, make sure you're viewing them against a high contrast background. A S4 beam is going to struggle to pop against a lit cyc, but against an upstage black, even PAR 64s will give you some shape.
Counter-intuitively, one sees light coming towards oneself better than light going away. I.e., backlight works better than frontlight. One might think it easier to see the haze particles when frontlit, but no. A laserist taught me this many eons ago.
Also depends on the breakup. A "coarse" one is going to read better than a "fine"; "sharp" better than "smooth", and so on.