Thread: Lighting

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Hello all, newbie here and hoping this is the right forum for my question.

Every year we have lighting nightmares. We have a privately owned home that opens its doors during October for Halloween tours. We decorate at least 17 rooms and have props, animatronics and live actors. The problem we always face is having lighting that doesn't blow through the whole room.

The one thing that we can't do is drill, saw, or damage the house. Another drawback!

We have tried lights with aluminum foil over, can lights, lamps, dimmer switches on the permanent lights in the ceilings....nothing seems to give the effect that we would like and that is simply not lighting the whole room. We have used green light bulbs, blue and red, to no avail.

Any suggestions, ideas, help, would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Wow there are so many variations to chose from. What is the effect your looking for?

We would like to highlight the actor or prop, but not the whole room. It sounds simple enough to us, but not when we try it. We have to be careful where we put it since we have tours going through. We don't want to hang someone with an electrical cord. We can actually put a light into the fixture in the ceiling, but it always puts out too much light. I was just wondering if we missing something in different kinds of light bulbs? Something that could be used as a cover for the light bulb? It sure makes us scratch our head every year.

What about laying rope light along the walls to mark the walking path and then just use those clip lights to highlight the prop?

Frankies Girl linked us to this site a while back. The first tutorial (episode 17?) shows how to light an actor without lighting the room. http://www.skullandbone.com/tutorial_01.htm

Thank you so much for some great ideas! This will help us out alot.

It wouldn't be so bad if bad lighting didn't give away the room right away and anything that might be "hiding" there.

Thank you again!

I find that the problem is always having too much light. Try buyng a cheap LED bulb and putting electrical tape over most of it -- leaving a small hole or triangle where you want light. (LED bulbs don't get hot) The cheaper LED bulbs are dimmer but that's exactly what you want. Use them in ground based fixtures.

Another thing I used in my haunt is to use black plastic curtains to divide the rooms and eliminate glare between rooms. However I'm not sure what you could attach them to if you don't own your house. We just attached them with cable ties to a hanging office-type ceiling in a senior recreation center..

Use pin spots.

Yep, I agree. I think you need to switch to LED pin spot lights. Here's a link to one manufacturer http://shop.minispotlight.com/main.sc :



Here's a picture of one of them on a wall:



Here's the effect:

We ordered a Ether HUB from http://etherealfx.com/ with LED lights for it. They also have a wearable version for actors depending on what you want to do.