We do something similar. Our
projector is an Epson Powerlite G5950 with a middle
throw zoom lens installed. It is permanently hung under our 2nd light bridge and is approximately 40' away from the
proscenium wall and about 20' above our
stage. Our
cyc is about 30' upstage of the
proscenium wall so that makes for a
throw distance of about 72'. Normally, it's projecting onto a DaLite fastfold
screen hung less than 10' back from the p-line, but we had a group rent the place and wanted us to attempt to use the
projector as a
backdrop like what you want.
The
image is kinda dim and will not compete with a lot of
bounce from any of the lights we have for our upstage zones. However, with
downstage lighting and carefully chosen downlight, it usually works fairly well. Bear in mind though, the
image produced on the
cyc is about 25' wide and maybe 18-20' tall. We usually mask the white space by bringing legs in and dropping a
border.
There are many on this board who are much more knowledgeable on projection than I, but I'm guessing to accomplish a 32'x32'
image with any reasonable clarity you're going to have to spend a lot of bread on a really powerful
projector, or find some way to blend multiple ones together.
The other issue with using a
projector is going to be when you do blackouts. Most projectors will still output some light even when black. This will show up as a square of light during your scene change blackouts.
We just finished installing a homebrew dowser built from a CD player to fix this. If you blend projection, this is going to get more complicated. I've done projection on
stage before and had a tech just
cover the
lens with a piece of cardboard during blackouts. Getting multiple ones to do it right will be challenging.
All told, the
projector cost about $6,000 to buy and install. You have to think about where it's going to be hung/placed and also how you're going to drive the slides.
Powerpoint,
Qlab,
etc. And some images may be copyrighted as well. I think now with the
dowser we may use this to provide digital backdrops (if you will) for our children's show, since the
build for that is usually less than exciting and this may be a way to jazz it up some, but it's just not enough to cut the mustard for anything other than stuff like that. Can it be done? Yes, to answer your question, but not with the
projector that was sitting in the conference room or on the media cart. Rental might be an option too, as was mentioned.
I would second the
gobo suggestion. We did that for Aladdin Jr. (children's show) and blended 3 or 4 lekos with star fields for the night scenes.
I personally liked this Apollo gobo for the realism. A couple lekos, some good
gel and hanging choices and you'll have a huge starfield that will be significantly cheaper than digital projection.