Well, the show came and went, and we ended up not using a curtain with a quick
release. That was really just to give a really awesome finale sequence. However, there was also some
stage illusion going on behind the scenes. The whole
point of the
drop curtain was to project the
image of a sillouette onto the curtain, so it looked like someone was standing behind the curtain, then when we dropped the curtain, there would be no one there. We decided to make our lead disappear because we realized he would need to be off
stage when the song in the finale ended. So, being having a hobby in special effects and
stage illusion (
stage magic) I opted for the classic way out-- a
projector. This is how alot of pro
stage illusions are done- with digital projectors. If you have ever seen where they have the magician or a "volunteer" locked in something or onto something with danger/death coming if they don't
escape, and then they
drop a curtain between the audience and the illusion and illuminate it from the back, that's how it's done. You are not seeing a real sillouette, that is a digital projection (trust me on this one- i know a person or two). This is the route we were going to take, and since our quick
release curtain was up and working (very well I might add), I thought it'd be easy to project a moving
image onto the curtain, so that way it looked all the more real and it was even wilder when we dropped the curtain and no one was back there. HOWEVER, I must give a few words of caution to anyone wishing to use digital projection onstage.
1.) You need a very bright
projector to be seen clearly, even if that is the only thing illuminated on the entire
stage and the rest is dark, the light from a standard computer
projector will not be that impressive.
2.) Your
image will be pixelized. TRUST ME. We used a very high-end
DLP projector that my dad has for work- this is the kind that projects 1080i Nativly, and the pixels were still clearly visible. We then tried the projection of a still
image, taken with a 8 megapizel digital camera, thinking that if it was the full resolution, it might look less digital. Still didn't work. You could clearly see the pixels all the way back to mid-house. One thing that sort-of worked was we blurred the
image slightly, brought the projected
image slightly out of focus so the pixels weren't clearly defined. This worked for the audience, but anyone that is kinda close to the
screen can tell it's digital, and let's
face it, if you are trying to pull off a "magic" trick on
stage, it has to be flawless.
At the end of the day, for my quick-release mechanism, I threaded two peices of fishing
line through the curtain and false top, starting at each end, and having the lines meet in the center. I then fashioned a small device that was spring-loaded. You pushed two peices of metal together (driven apart by the spring) and then put a washer over the two pieces of metal to hold them together. The two peices of fishing
line were pinched between the two peices of metal, and the washer attached to a "
drop line". When we pulled the
drop line, the washer was yanked off of the two peices of metal, allowing them to seperate and freeing the fishing
line. The fishing
line unthreaded itself due to the weight of the curtain, and the curtain dropped very evenly.
Overall, I have to say that method worked quite well, I just wished really well, I just wished we could have used it...
-stephen
"never accept limits, they only limit you"