Here is the real issue with owning moving lights in a high school setting. You make this very large initial investment on a very complicated and high tech piece of equipment. Now you have to maintain it! Consider that replacing the lamps in these fixtures will run you over $250 when you have to do both fixtures. Then consider who will be handling the fixtures. Unless your supervisor (teacher, drama person, TD, or whatever) knows how to do maintenance on these fixtures you will have to
send them out for service, if and when they need it, and in a high school, they will need it! All of this costs a lot of money, the cost of ownership of moving lights can be very high.
I would suggest looking at our collaborative article about the
Gafftaper Method.
Gaff is one of our members and through a lot of discussion came up with the method. In a nutshell, it talks about using other devices to achieve that effects that you more commonly use from moving lights. So you might consider buying color scrollers or Seachangers to produce color effects, which is usually the most common use for moving lights in
theatre. You might
pick up some
gobo rotators,
Apollo Right Arms, or I-Cues.
As was mentioned, you should also think about making sure that your inventory of
conventional fixtures is where you need it to be. I have been in many high schools where they have a great
theatre and not nearly enough lights to create simple washed for a show. If you don't have enough conventionals for a front
wash, a back
wash, a side
wash (from each side) and a
template wash then i would seriously look into
conventional fixtures before anything else.
Also, if you are going to get into any type of
DMX controlled gear, you might want to think about upgrading your control. You might want to step up to an
ETC Element or one of the
Strand Palettes which will make programming any
DMX gear you get much easier than the
Express.
