Rice paper lanterns

[peternewman]

It might be worth looking into the LED Pixels I wanted enclosures for here, actual info from the guy that makes and sells them here. I believe he's currently out of stock, but the big advantage is you can buy twelve for the price of most cheap LED pars, then you could stick them to an inner sphere facing outwards to illuminate the entire sphere. It would also then give you the option to have different parts of it different colours if you wanted. Any questions on it feel free to get back to me.

[Kopy]

Hi,

 

I did exactly the same thing last year for a tour. We suspended chroma-q colour blocks ( http://www.aclighting.com/colorblock/index.htm ) inside the lanterns with a frost loosly attached to the front of the unit to throw the light out a bit. The handy thing was that the arms of the lanterns fitted exactly on top of the yoke arms, and each light only requires some 4-pin XLR in and out - which is what we suspended them with.

 

You can see them in action during a TV award show we did here after the tour finished:

 

 

Whatever you do though I'd recommend not doing this outdoors on a windy day. I speak from experience.

 

Lots of love,

 

Adam Copland.

[Smiley]

This link takes you to some MR16 RGB units that are reasonably priced. You do however need to purchase a driver unit that can run up to 12 of these units via DMX. I have them in my livingroom placed inside Par16 Birdie's colour washing walls. They produce a large range of colour tones. The effect is quite good for LED. You would be able to resell after use or keep for future events.

 

http://www.rapidonline.com/productinfo.asp...;catRef=55-2046

 

Best of luck.

[TimPlinth]

It might be worth looking into the LED Pixels I wanted enclosures for here

This looks like a great solution! I'm doing some research in to them now and just trying to figure out how I would rig it up as to have enough power to each lantern. Given that each lantern will be suspended several meters I can't just daisy chain every pixel together. Any suggestions? I like the idea of being able to use multiple colours within the one lantern.

 

I did exactly the same thing last year for a tour. We suspended chroma-q colour blocks.

Thanks Adam. After seeing this everything else seems insignificant. It was great to see what was in my head actually being done in real life. The effect you had was exactly what I'm going for. How many of the blocks did you place inside the lanterns? Was there just one strip facing the front? Any other tips/tricks you can provide?

[peternewman]

This looks like a great solution! I'm doing some research in to them now and just trying to figure out how I would rig it up as to have enough power to each lantern. Given that each lantern will be suspended several meters I can't just daisy chain every pixel together. Any suggestions? I like the idea of being able to use multiple colours within the one lantern.

The interconnection between pixels is on RJ45 which carries both power and DMX and I think its about 200mA per pixel. So if you buy or make a DMX splitter (see my other topic for the one I'm looking at making) then you can inject power and just drop one Cat 5 to each pixel. Or if you don't want to do that, then one up and one down and you can daisy chain as normal. I can't see why this would be an issue unless I've missed something. The only other thing to bear in mind is the 32 device limit unless you use splitters and the constant LED issue of channel counts with 3/4 channels per pixel. I think he is currently out of stock of the normal ones, but he has other options including RGBAW ones. Anyway they are all listed on his website.

 

I did exactly the same thing last year for a tour. We suspended chroma-q colour blocks.

I'd also be interested in how you managed to juggle lineing up the colour block with the lantern.

[Kopy]

Hi,

 

Sorry I don't have any photos of that tour but what we did is just put one colour block inside each lantern pointing straight down with some frost/diffusion gaffed to the front - not tight to the unit but really loosely. This has the effect of spreading the light out in all directions, a bit light a reflector I suppose.

 

Adam.

[TimPlinth]

one colour block inside each lantern pointing straight down

Ok, thanks for that! That is really interesting because (perhaps it is just the compression from YouTube) it almost looks as though you can see a straight line running vertically inside the lantern. Right, so it is just one block at the top facing downward with some frosting diffusing the light.

 

Were the rice paper shades you used about 1m diameter? They were a good size for that job.