Making it rain... and making it visible
- Thread starterKurt
- Start date
Brother we are one in the same (Creepy ass way to start this). i'm a lighting designer for my school as well. we have no budget (as in $0.00) so i'm always on the lookout for parts that i can buy on the cheap or things that i can make myself. but you're sorta SOL because the thing you want is a film FX loop and costs somthing like 400$. sorry bud.
Jakepugh15
Member
Side Light helps.... instead of useing water use milk... it shows up better... has a better texture...
Yeah, we aren't going to be using milk, but we will give the water a more milky color for that purpose
Sorry for being slow on the updates, this show has got me in the 3/4 asleep state for a while. Rain mechanism went up last Sunday. I put in more fresnels than I like to think about above (the mechanism hugs the catwalk so side light is difficult) and some scoops on the side (not exactly on the side but slightly angled. I also put down an etc parnel on a floor stand lighting the rain directly from the side. Upon running the rain and seeing it from the house I found that none of it works very well. I'm putting in strip lights on the set itself and lighting it from the back, literally facing the audience. I may put colored lenses in the strips if it is too harsh on the eyes, but I will see how well it goes for making the rain visible when we run it again tonight. Opening night is tomorrow so I've got really high hopes that this goes well tonight. Fingers crossed!
Thanks for the update. Again as for lighting it "high" back light "raking" the back of the rain. Straight on back light into peoples eyes isn't going to get it. Equally important, big drops not spray. Remember the 2 rules of rain (1) high volume, low pressure water. (2) A high 3/4 back light raking the back of the drops. Also to much light and small high pressure drops and it looks milky, almost an atmosphereic curtain or mess. I still say take a 12 to 16 foot pipe and base or some sort of stand, and attach a rain head or whatever your useing for your drops to it and run a water source to it. On a sunny day, out in an open space turn on the water and walk around 360' and observe the suns relationship to you (audience) rain and sun (your lighting). Also mess with water pressure and volume. I suggest this because you won't have a mess to deal with later and you can take your time observing. Done right FOH should not see the light source at all. Finally, dialing in rain and lighting it takes alot of time to get right. Sometimes it's alot of hit and miss mostly miss. One more thought, one big light source instead of many small. Like a Skypan or a 10k or even a boarder light or two together vertically. You don't need to run them at full by any means, just get as much coverage from the one position as possible. Remember from you outdoors observations, the sun is high up and it should start looking it's best left or right of center in back of the rain. I think you'll also find it can be pretty close to the back of the rain depending on the spread or coverage of the light . Godspeed my friend!
So after doing some tinkering upon the final dress failure, I've come up with a solution that works well. The rain itself has been fairly good in terms of volume and pressure, but the milkiness never really happened. What I found was that after all the failed attempts to do the lighting in a way that the audience won't see the source (In theory this should work but in practice it crashed and burned for me) What I really need is lighting that can cover a large area from the back but isn't all that bright. A really dim light that covers most of the rain has proven to light it extremely well. My actual procedure was one of putting a scoop on the stand previously used for the parnel and placing said scoop directly behind the rain itself. The scoop proved to have enough throw to cover most of the rain, even at levels dim enough to be comfortable for the audience. If I had more time with the rain I would have ensured we had it dyed and done a lot more testing with it (I'd do the sunlight thing but I don't think I've ever seen the sun before XD), but for a low-budget high school production I think I did pretty well 
This will most likely end up being my last experimental update in terms of the rain. We close on Saturday night and the week after that we will be striking and getting started on the Laramie Project. Thank you everyone for all of the useful information! I've learned a lot from this whole experience.
This will most likely end up being my last experimental update in terms of the rain. We close on Saturday night and the week after that we will be striking and getting started on the Laramie Project. Thank you everyone for all of the useful information! I've learned a lot from this whole experience.
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