fire

[propmonkey]

We're doing The SKin of Our Teeth for our fall play. it calls for footlights down stage for the fire place. We do not have any footlights and or money to spend. I have a few pars 64s and one par 35 or 48 and a few 6" fernels. any ideas to how to make it look like fire?

 

heres pic of what space I have too work with.

 

http://www.sdb.k12.wi.us/mathmagic/sdb_tour/bmhs_qtvr.html

[paulears]

I can't say I have seen many high schools with a theatre like yours here in the uk - in fact many pro theatres are smaller! with such a nice building, why don't you have any equipment?

 

anyway - fire effect in a fireplace on a budget. a few years ago here in the uk fire effect electric room heaters were very popular - the ones we now have are much cleverer, but the old ones had moulded plastic coals that were illuminated with a red lamp from below. If you can find one of these mouldings in a second hand shop you can light it from the rear. any of your pars or similar will do - use a mixture of something like 019 fire, 021 gold and 101 yellow. make up a very slow chase to create overlapping colours - make sure the yellow and gold are kept quite low. if you can build in a small fan - computer pc cooler type with a few small streamers attached that will flutter about in between the light sources and the moulding it works quite nicely.

 

alternatively, a moving head of some sort with breakups, slow gobo and very slow rotate very out of focus is sometimes effective too.

[tlc]

If you have access to a video/data projector these can provide excellent fire effects.

A piece of film /animation inserted into a Powerpoint presentation is the easy way to do this.

This allows the effect to be switched on/off easily using a laptop/desktop.

[Guest lightnix]

If the overall light level on stage is going to be low, you might be able to make a "firebox" using half a dozen domestic lightbulbs or architectural tubes and fire-coloured gels. Line the box with aluminium foil and maybe cover the front with a light (Hamburg ?) frost. Give each bulb its own circuit and run it on a long "ripple" type chase for a flicker effect.

 

I can't say I have seen many high schools with a theatre like yours... why don't you have any equipment?

I can't say I've seen many high schools like that in the UK - the place looks like a palace -_-

[computer]

we've done a similar thing before, we had 3 battens of 3 birdies in a little triangle on the floor, with a red, orange and yellow (ish) gel to each batten, with reds, orange, yellows on 3 seperate circuits, then the desk was programmed to do a flickers bouncy effect and then added to the cues we needed it

[Djbarryblue]

You could use some domestic light bulbs in box cover with red yellow gel have them on a separate circits and wire them to a starter for a flarencent tube this making them fliker then dont need to program one on the desk.

 

Barry

[Tomo]

You could use some domestic light bulbs in box cover with red yellow gel have them on a separate circits and wire them to a starter for a flarencent tube this making them fliker then dont need to program one on the desk.

Not a good idea Barry - flouro starters work by pulses of High Voltage - not the kind of thing you want running through domestic lamps in a homemade appliance.

 

Much better to run them through your standard dimmer packs - two channels would be enough, flicker between them in a random highspeed chase and away you go.

[Ike]

Really? I thought they just acted as a switch to power the tubes end filaments?

[lonfire]

hi,

I've done the old flourescent starter trick loads of times.. works really well.. you get a really good random fire effect..

 

a starter is just a random switch..

 

http://home.howstuffworks.com/question337.htm

 

just wire it in serial with the bulb..

 

rgds

chris

[PeterT]

flouro starters work by pulses of High Voltage

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I'm sorry Tomo but that's not correct, A starter is simply a bimetalic strip that when it heats up breaks the contact causing a large back EMF in the tube hopefully starting the tube. Like anything involved with electricity, caution is recommended if you're not sure how something should be wired. but I have used the bulb box on numerous occasions and it works really well. as Lonfire says:

 

just wire it in serial with the bulb..

 

I'd also recomend having a couple of lamps permanently on so there's always a constant glow. I use red, amber and yellow bulbs flickering and a red and amber constantly on.

[Just Some Bloke]

If you're squeamish about using starters on domestic bulbs, then just use some small flourescent tubes wrapped with assorted colours of gel and running off the wrong size starter. If the starter can't quite manage to get the flouro going then it will flicker nicely. Used this version before and it works a treat.

 

JSB

[propmonkey]

thanks everyone. im going to be probably working on putting the fire together in a month. I also have to have "four weather singnals" I plan to use 4 circiuts with 4 regular lamps each. I still have 4 more ciciuts left for the fire. also whats a ballist? I found 3 in our prugatory(a light storage).

 

we're hoping to get 2 moving mirrors for our musical in the spring, roboscans 518. we'll hopefully rent then if we like buy. I sure hope we can get them. we're also thinking about getting a few more strand zooms. im hoping for source4 zooms. as soon as I can get my stagemanager to let me upload my web version of our theatre site, it will have more info.