Rain Effect

[Tom Baldwin]

My only question regarding real water lies in controlling the pressure - surely the randomness of the rain would be lost and it would look rather like a urinal?

The trick if you're using a rain pipe (horizontal perforated pipe running across the top of window/ stage/ etc) is for the holes to be in the top of it.

 

If the holes are in the bottom, then you're right, you will get an Alan Titchmarsh feature urinal effect, but by putting the holes in the top only, then the water flow gets disrupted enough as streams cross and the droplets falling back down strike the rain pipe itself.

 

Tom

 

NB Ghostbusters rules don't apply to rain effects, OK?

[andy_s]

if you prefer to go down the lcd route, you could try using a mirror to divert the projector beam, giving you an extended throw distance and a larger image size in a cramped space.

Aaah, the old front silvered optically flat mirror - that'll be cheap then! Agreed however you could probably use a bathroom mirror for a rain effect, but don't bother trying with one for decent video/ film reflection!

completely agree - if the image has to be the centre of attention, you should spend as much money on it as possible to get high quality results, but a low grade mirror would probably suffice for this sort of moving wallpaper effect where the audience should really be focussed on the scene being played in front of the scenery, not on the scenery itself - one of those "getting away with it" justifications that production managers with low budgets are very fond of quoting....

 

incidently, forkbeard fantasy use lots of relatively non-digital cine to great effect, but I imagine that if you tried to source the retro style equipment they use for a one-off project, it would turn out to be a very expensive exercise - I looked into prices for carousel slide projectors for a show where the 35mm slide and all that goes with it was a "design concept" as opposed to a cheap solution - and was a little taken aback at how expensive old outmoded technology was!