Thread: Simple Floating Tarot Cards effect?

Tweet

Anyone here constructed a simple floating tarot cards effect? Thinking the simplest would be repurposing a battery-operated child's mobile and attaching tarot cards in place of whatever was on the mobile. Would love to see instructions / video, etc for this type of effect. Thinking this would be great combined with a haunted ouija board scene.

That would work or you could use something like a FCG rig.

Originally Posted by skullboy

That would work or you could use something like a FCG rig.

Thanks Skullboy. Anyone got any videos of this effect? Would love to see different implementations of it.

Nope never did it.

Any ideas, anyone, as to what Tarot deck I should buy? There's the standard A.E Waite Tarot deck. Thinking larger form factor cards would be better, but I have no idea what's out there other than the "standard" Waite one.

Would a $13 mirror ball motor from Party City work for this? Thinking it would, because obviously it can be mounted to have a mirror ball hanging down from it. Just not sure how, exactly, I would create a harness to have the tarot cards hang down.

Would be nice to have the rotation plus and up and downward motion. But I'm thinking the whole FCG set-up is beyond my abilities.

Anyone know of a good source for hi-resolution images of the rider-waite tarot card deck? Saw that the images are on Wikipedia, but are too poor in resolution to do anything with. And I'm thinking the original cards are probably too small for an effect like this.

Here's a link to the Wikipedia article on the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. It has links to images for each card:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider-Waite_tarot_deck

Resolution / size isn't fantastic, but probably good enough. Here's an example of The Magician card:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RW...1_Magician.jpg

I suppose if there are any particular subset of cards I'd want to use for the effect, I could search on http://images.google.com for higher-resolution versions.

I'm surprised no one here has done a floating tarot cards effect. Might also be cool to do a moving Tarot card effect on a table; similar to a haunted chess board.

Today at Party City, I picked up a $13, D-cell battery driven mirror ball motor. Thinking I might use it, somehow, for this effect--or for a light-weight FCG (seems someone out there has used a mirror ball motor, but I realize it won't have much torque).

Part of my problem is that I'm mechanically challenged; don't really "get" how I can transform the circular motion of a motor into other kinds of motion. Think I need a good book on basic animatronics.