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Seeing Stars


blindwithlight

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There was great star effect in the West End musical 'Loserville' where a bunch of moving lights were flown in pointing towards the audience (within your budget I'm sure!) but the effect was that each light had a rotating gobo which gave a great twinkle across the entire audience. Maybe a couple of source 4's with gobo rotators could do the same effect?
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If you have six dimmer channels available or power for a six channel dimmer rack, then this ABC Sky Tour can be used as a basis to see what is in the sky at a particular time, then split into three for projection onto the stage right, stage rear and stage left walls using six small profiles. If we use two gobos per wall with each gobo on a seperate dimmer channel using a chase program set to about 100% fade, we can get the stars shimmering as you see on the ABC web site, or slowly changing so the audience can perceive that the sky is not static. If dimmer channels are in short supply, then put three gobos on each channel, i.e. ch1 SL gobo 1 and CS gobo2 and SL gobo 1, ch2 SL gobo 2 and CS gobo 1 and SL gobo 2.

 

That way the profiles can be left in the rig for the season. You need to check angles to see if you need to keep the stars off the actors.

 

I have used this setup for fireworks for The Darling Buds of May, where I used three gobos for each firework position, a rising trail of the rocket or mortar, an exploding firework and a falling trails of the firework pattern. Took 36 profiles, two thirds were 50W mini gobo projectors and a twelve channel dimmer rack, with three lights from different fireworks on each dimmer channel.

 

What does the script tell you about the constellation ? Is there a particular one you have to see.

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Have you got much time in the venue to experiment?

 

We used to do "laser" shows with 35mm slide projectors... A bit of black foil in the frame and use a needle to punch holes through! You can also load up lots of "constellations" in a carousel this way!

 

As I recall we used to seperate the power feed to the projector lamp so that we could dim the effects.

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Many, many thanks to everyone for all the different ideas. Fibre optic would be very cool. However I've decided to go with the mirror ball with 4 x pin spots on it - blanking out sections of mirror to give my own 'Constellation'. I've decided to go this way as the star cloth and fibre optic ideas would be time consuming to get right and I have very limited time in the studio before we open (5 hours to be exact). I would love to have time to play with some of the idea's given (especially the video mapping idea w/ beamers) but this show will not afford me the time. Thank you for the link re the lasers as I wasn't aware of the licensing issues mac.calder.

 

I was worried about getting an idea in mind of how to do the "Stars" and not having time to correct it in the studio should in not work out how I envisaged. It's now clear in my minds eye how it will look and I'm very happy and content that I can achieve the right look with the mirror ball with the added assurances given. Again many thanks to all that posted - I'm off to hunt down a suitable mirror ball !!!

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