Grease - Drive in scene

[cameroncoats]

Can anyone help out with a lighting dilemma?

We need a lighting effect so that the actors look like they are watching a movie (Diffused white light)

We have one spare Source 4, however when we tried this with an opaque white gel we simply lit up the whole room with a warm white.

Any ideas?

[Jivemaster]

try different amounts of diffusion or frost, try to consider some kind of flicker at a slow rate.

[paulears]

The problem is the white diffused light - movies flicker and you can sometimes get away with a profile that flickers, perhaps even in a colour - or maybe a split colour - blue at the top, red in the middle and green at the bottom - experiment, and then defocus it so the colours blend. If you had two, you could put them next to each other and have even breakups in them so that when you flicker them both randomly, you get a little animation style movement.

 

Sticking white diffuser in them is just a floodlight!

[J Pearce]

Having just played with something similar for work, an out of focus data projector does the job beautifully, as you might expect.

 

Looking at your age, I'm guessing this is a school production? Schools normally have a few loose projectors around, maybe you could experiment?

[Joe Bleasdale]

I did this when I was in school. I LD'd the show and I had some 250 Entours in the rig. Sound played an effect that sounded like an old movie film going and I pointed two of the Entours at the car from the front, I got a strobe going and then lowered the dimmer right down so it was barley noticeable. With some touches of generic for face lighting etc, it looked good. But of course only works if you have Moving Light, which is probably a bad thing to bring up around here. You could point a projector straight at the car so you have something projected onto the actors and the area around them, then invert the image so it is back to front so it looks like it is the other way round. That way it looks like they are watching it on a screen and because it is dark the images are bouncing off.

 

Thanks,

[GridGirl]

It's the flicker that's the important part. Paulears is on the money, I reckon - and as well as a split gel, I think I'd experiment with putting some sort of breakup gobo in the unit as well.

[rossmck]

A colour wheel with lots of split gels in it can work really well ... if you can find a colour wheel from somewhere that allows continuous rotation.

[andy_s]

a small variation on Ross's suggestion:

 

I recall a show when I was at drama school back in the last century using a colour wheel motor on a Pattern 23 with a home-made ( or "custom built" to make it sound more kosher) plywood disc - with wedge cut outs rather than the round holes of the colour wheel, to flicker, giving a jerky sense of movement to actors pretending to be in a silent movie, sort of like a strobe. To my mind this was better than a strobe - not so extreme, but these days strobes are much more controlable, so you could experiment with this if you had access to one. If not, you could see about getting hold of a colour wheel motor for your source 4 and possibly use this idea to light actors pretending to watch a movie rather than be in one - if the wedge cut outs were not all of uniform size, this combined with a vari-speed motor might give quite a nice effect.

 

(for "colour wheel motor", substitute "animation disc motor")

[Andrew C]

I've done the effect with a disk with random sized holes in it. Spun by hand in front of a profile with split gel in it. Worked a treat and cost practically nothing.

[Bobbsy]

I'm just a noise boy (well, noisy old git) but I've done it exactly Andrew's way on a couple of occasions. The disc can be a real mish-mash of everything from small irregular holes to some big gashes and if the person spinning it varies the speed it can look extremely effective.

 

It's totally inaccurate but, as previously mentioned, a low-level sound effect of a projector clattering away helps the illusion.

 

Bob

[Jivemaster]

Remember that the flicker is to represent the natural progression of light and dark scenes, not the 16/18/24/25/30 etc frame rate. ( I remember running a 9.5 projector at IIRC 16 fps and some of the films were definitely shot at less that that which is where the strobe stop motion comes from).

[maxjones2000]

The way we are possibly doing it at school next year is by having the car facing the audience, as if the screen is behind the audience. We're probably going to use a normal projector behind the car pointing into the audience and playback a video that maybe has an old filter put into it. With some haze, this should look quite good. Only problem would be trying not to blind the audience with the projector, so we need to experiment a bit with that. Just thought its an alternative way of doing it... :(

[paulears]

Max - I've never seen one where the cast face away from the audience - nobody would see their faces, would they?

[Smiffy]

Only problem would be trying not to blind the audience with the projector

 

A good focus is always worth its weight in gold. If you can get the thing focussed into some dead space that the majority of the Audience wouldn't be able to see that would help too. If you shine a light over them to somewhere behind them, they will turnaround. In an ideal world, you focus it down to a small square on the front of the Balcony, but as it's been suggested that this is a school production, there's every possibility that you wont have a balcony to focus onto. Only a minor point I know, but worth consideration.

 

You are spot on with the haze too. No point in doing the effect if you can't see the beam :P

 

Cheers

 

Smiffy

[maxjones2000]

Max - I've never seen one where the cast face away from the audience - nobody would see their faces, would they?

The cast onstage would be facing the audience as if the film screen is BEHIND the audience/auditorium, so they would be looking into the audience as if watching the film behind the auditorium (FOH). So with a bit of frontlight (Lee 152 or Lee 170) it would look nice, as you would see the casts expressions etc.

 

 

A good focus is always worth its weight in gold. If you can get the thing focussed into some dead space that the majority of the Audience wouldn't be able to see that would help too. If you shine a light over them to somewhere behind them, they will turnaround. In an ideal world, you focus it down to a small square on the front of the Balcony, but as it's been suggested that this is a school production, there's every possibility that you wont have a balcony to focus onto. Only a minor point I know, but worth consideration.

 

You are spot on with the haze too. No point in doing the effect if you can't see the beam ;)

 

Thats great thanks Smiffy. I could focus the projector onto the little bit of wall above the control room 'window', which wouldn't overly blind anyone :D Will have to experiment!! I think haze will look nice :D