Realistic LED birthday cake candles... with a remote control??

There's "ugly up close" and "how it will be seen from the audience point of view"...when at the podium our presenters complain how the projected image looks fuzzy and low res, but when we tell them to go into the audience and see it from THEIR VIEW it's a different story.

I suggest you do a similar test before ordering something too dainty and dim that it can't be seen from the audience.
 
You can custom make small candles with miniature LEDs or grain-of-wheat lamps. We can provide you with help and advice on that if you like.

We make very small wireless dmx dimmers that will easily fit in the cake and control them. Then your candles are part of your scenes and cues, controlled from your lighting controller. Purchase or rent.

Jim
RC4 Wireless
www.theatrewireless.com
[email protected]
 
I like the grain of wheat idea. Gets you down to the birthday candle size.

But can the light be seen from the AUDIENCE????? That is what matters!

GOW bulbs have their place in dollhouses and HO railroads, but unless running them at 100% in a 100% dark auditorium (meaning NO other light on stage whatsoever), even then I doubt they could be seen from the middle row back.

Remember the "candlelight" has to compete with the stage lighting, and GOW bulbs aren't up to it.
 
Last edited:
Grain-of-wheat bulbs are what all the original Phantom of the Opera candles used. But, of course, the scene was designed to accommodate their brightness. And many were used at once.

There are some very bright tiny LEDs available, and the the Digital Persistence mode in our dimmers will make then rise and fall like a filament lamp.

When I’ve made candle tips, I encapsulated the light source in tinted epoxy. If you want more diffusion, add a bit of high quality clean white sand. It sounds like you don’t need to make a lot of them. If you do, make a mold. I used cherry wood and carved the mold by hand (this was many years ago), today you could CNC mill it if you have a machine. Then use any kind of wax or oil as a release agent, and the epoxy with LEDs embedded inside will pop right out after the expoxy hardens.

Is there translucent filament material for 3D printing? If so, design halves with an inner cavity, then glue them together with the LEDs inside.

Jim
RC4
 
But can the light be seen from the AUDIENCE????? That is what matters!

GOW bulbs have their place in dollhouses and HO railroads, but unless running them at 100% in a 100% dark auditorium (meaning NO other light on stage whatsoever), even then I doubt they could be seen from the middle row back.

Remember the "candlelight" has to compete with the stage lighting, and GOW bulbs aren't up to it.

We just did a show with 200+ candles, all grain of wheat. Even with the stage wash at full you could still pick out the candles.
If you want a brighter source and no heat, I've had great success with these prewired dimmable LEDs. Saves some time on the install since you're not soldering anything, there's no visible step to the fade curve that I've seen with either RC4 or LED decoders.
 
But can the light be seen from the AUDIENCE????? That is what matters!

GOW bulbs have their place in dollhouses and HO railroads, but unless running them at 100% in a 100% dark auditorium (meaning NO other light on stage whatsoever), even then I doubt they could be seen from the middle row back.

Remember the "candlelight" has to compete with the stage lighting, and GOW bulbs aren't up to it.
When I built an actor-operated birthday cake with candles for a production of "Crimes of the Heart", I used plain old flicker LEDs I pried out of flickering tealights ($1 for two, at a dollar store). I could see the "flames" in 75% dimmer illumination from the control booth, and people in the audience thought we were using real candles. Those things are bright, and contain the flicker controls inside the LEDs themselves. LEDs have gotten way brighter these days.

My control system was an Arduino with two buttons and sixteen relays--push one button to start the lighting sequence, push the second button to make the candles look like the actor is blowing them out--but I can see someone using small DMX controllers to control all of them.
 
My director nixed those candles from the start. There aren't that many sources for on-stage LED candles that look realistic, especially as you get to the smaller types of candles, so building the prop tends to be the solution for smaller candle systems.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back