rec.arts.theatre.stagecraft

Steve < @ > wrote in
news: @ :

> On 23 Oct, 10:14, Rick Fears
> wrote:
>>
>> The Whitwell Players, Herts, are doing Wizard of Oz this Christmas
>>
>>
>> and I'm trying to work out some effects:
>> 1- a tornado. Current plan is to go to blackout, lots of sound FXs,
>> change the set then back up. Sounds fairly lame to me, is there any
>> better way to do a tornado using lights?
>> 2- a rainbow. I try to avoid classical projections as I find it very
>> difficult to balance ambient light and projection on our stage - any
>> ideas?
>>
>> All suggestions gratefully received!
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Rick
>> --
>> LD Whitwell Players
>
> For a school production, with more limited means, we borrowed a
> follow spot and I cut a gobo in the shape of the classic twister -
> fade it in and move around the stage and the auditorium add lfx and
> sfx that get louder and it worked.
>
> Steve
>
>

Steve
thanks for the suggestion but we haven't got space to move a follow spot
around, especially on Saturday night when we tend to fill the hall to
fire capacity. Also we only have one good follow-spot operator and she's
needed for other effects...

I'm currently thinking about using a flame fan sort of effect where a
bit of scenery is actually a box with a big fan in the bottom that has
weighted cloth streamers coming out of it and that can be dragged across
the stage. This will need quite a lot of experimentation and probably
won't work (how do you get a fan to generate a vortex - still thinking
that one through!) but if I can get the cloth to go 9' up with suitable
up-lighting from the box and fluxing general lighting it might be OK...

At least the noise of the fan will be disguised by the general SFX.

Cheers
--
Rick