Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Possible Non-Nihilist Teardown of the Light Rack Toward a Green Screen

The regulars may even know what that means!

The light rack has five laser units and two RGB LED units.  There are two primary lasers with big cojones who make big sparks plus there are three green lasers which are fairly wimpish but still live.  The Big Bad Wolf ate the purples.  They were old and they were wimps and now they are deceased (sob).


Part the First

Remove the units from the rack and place them in specific locations about the studio.  When the lights and lasers are fixed to the truss for the light rack, they're limited in what they can do but they have an excellent vantage point from which to spray the room with color.  That's very nice, very nice but for photographic purpose spreading them about and putting lights in opposition to each other can yield much more dramatic effects.

Positive purpose.


Part the Second

Remove the truss from the light rack.  The truss is heavy-guage steel and replace that with the single steel bar which came with the light rack kit (i.e. bundle).

Move this to the other end of the Rockhouse where it becomes the support for the green screen.  The only variable is the length of the single steel bar.  I need as close to twelve feet long as I can get and there is zero chance this bar will bend under the weight of the green screen sheet.  You could hang cases of them from it and there wouldn't be a deviation.  No bend = no wrinkles = no shadows = high quality masking for the effect.



There are adverse considerations as it's good to have all the lights interconnected so a light controller device can be used to manage them (i.e. change colors, configurations, displays, etc).  With the lights more distant from each other, it means longer cables, bigger hassles, more wire snakes on the floor, etc.  That's not even terminal as this places looks like an electronic hellhole (or delight, depending on perspective) anyway.


Work Factor

It's not terribly awful as there's no huge task but rather a number of smaller, more satisfyingly annoying smaller ones.  So it's not beyond reason to accomplish it beyond dealing with a big hassle.


Result:

The much-wanted green screen will stretch across the rear end of the room behind the P.A. cabinets.

Lighting effects will be much more diverse and I'm bored with always using them the same way.


Maybe you can visualize this one:  imagine one of the lasers is moved to the back of the room in front of the green screen and shooting back at the Rockhouse.  Another is at the other end, in front, and shoots back at the other laser.  Now imagine the green screen is being used so I can add, say, a picture of the lunar surface.  Now we have can have a laser battle right here in the Rockhouse with Ed Wood's lunar monsters (i.e. add a monster with a third layer of video in Final Cut).

I hope you can see that one as that's got me kind of tickled.

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