Silhouette screens

[fireball40k]

Our local amdram group are shortly to put on a show that, in one James Bond routine, needs to have three ladies dancing in silhouette behind three screens. Each dancer/screen will be lit from a point source upstage and the dancers will be roughly 1 metre away from their screens. My question relates to the material used for the screen. My thought is to use a wide roll of Lee diffusion gel stapled to the screen frame. But I'm not sure which strength of diffusion to go for - has anyone done it this way? Or is there a better (not too expensive) material to use?

[ImagineerTom]

Frosted shower curtain (do your own fire/flamability RA) which you can buy in the pound shop will be as good as anything else you can buy but at a fraction of the price. Failing that any old thin white fabric will do - the key ingredients here are the light source and the position of the girls relative to the screen and the light - moving any one of the three just a foot further forwards / backwards can make an epic difference to the size of the shadow you cast.

[alistermorton]

We used a large sheet of cotton stretched on a frame , and lit it with a 743 with its lens removed when we needed a large silhouette scene in 39 steps.

[Don Allen]

There have been similar discussions before, some of this may help Lighting for shadowography hand shadows , Shadow theatre . You couls also try a domestic flood without a reflector or a stage flood. I have used Patt 60 and Patt 137 as Linebach projectors and gobo projectors with their reflectors removed.

[fireball40k]

Thank you all. Things have moved on since my post and we have decided that the lanterns necessary to create the shadows would just get in the way of everything else. So we are now doing away with the screens and I will just backlight each dancer from above to silhouette them without using screens. For the number this will probably work out just as well.

[Don Allen]

The other way to silhouette a dancer is to use the cyc with no front or side light.