This weekend we are doing "The Wedding Singer" musical. Tomorrow I have to rig a bucket of water (or pipe, or balloon, or tube or whatever) that drops about a gallon or so of water onto the actress in a chair. It has to drop all the water at once and hit the target. I am not a fan of tipping over a bucket - though that is the easy route here - as the water splashes off to the side as the bucket tips.
I am thinking of using a bucket over a funnel of some sort (maybe a fixed bucket with a hole in the bottom). Or at least putting a shield on the side that the bucket tips towards.
First a word of caution, water falling as a cohesive mass can in some cases react like a solid object causing the same damage as a falling rock or similar object of the same weight. Watch this video if you want to see what water can do to a car. I doubt that the amount of water you are planning on using will cause any damage, but as always you are responsible for testing it before using it on anyone.
That being said I would use a ball valve on the bottom of a stack of pvc pipe. Both the size of the valve and the tank pipe depend on the length and speed of the effect, so I will leave the sizes up to you. But if you want a bucket I would get a 5 gal pail from the hardware store and drill a hole in the bottom and get a water bucket small enough to be tipped over inside of the bigger funnel bucket.
OK - it's built and tested. Worked great. I rigged a smaller bucket to dump into a 5 gal Home Depot bucket into which we cut a 4" hole in the bottom. Had the desired funneling effect. Director says 2L of water was not enough, but one gallon is too much IMHO - so going with 4L for opening night tomorrow = approx one gallon. Lots of mopping during intermission! We tested it with one gallon out in the driveway before rigging it, and that is a lot of water! Should have the desired effect, though.
We just did wedding singer along with this effect. It was staged under a 25' catwalk and we basically just poured water into a funnel and everyone was pretty happy with how it looked.
