TRANSCRIPT & SCREENGRABS
Today I want to show you a tombstone I designed. This was for a national tour A Christmas Carol. This unit uses tricks that you might appreciate. Some of you will already be familiar with a good bit of this.
We want a tombstone for Scrooge that will display his name on cue.
We’re going to base this on a thing called a Light Box.
A light box is a physical box you build with a pattern cut into it that can glow.
I’ve used them to create neon signs, exit signs, and moonboxes. In the past twenty years, I have used them less and less as projections have become easier and easier to do for shows.
When you make a light box, you cut slots or a shape into wood or some other flat material. You’re going to mount it to a box. The inside of the box should be flat white.
Highly reflective surfaces will defeat your goal. You want the inside to glow very brightly but also to be very very even and soft. You do NOT want hot spots or flares of light visible anywhere. Lumpy light ruins the image. Let the light bulbs fill it with light, but do not let them or their broken reflections be seen at all – just their soft glow.
This tombstone begins with a light box just like this. It’s big, so we’re going to give it a base to ride on.
We’ll cover Scrooge’s name on the inside with a colored lighting filter and frost. Paper would work, too, or some other diffuser.
The light bulbs are down in the bottom along with maybe an AC battery pack and maybe a remote control light switch. Or maybe it has a power cord.
We put all this together so that Scrooge’s name lights up on demand.
The problem is that you can kind of still see the name even when its not lit up.
I know some people just spin the tombstone around – and that works. Sometimes a little magic is fun, though.
Here’s a magic material that I love to use for stuff like this.
This is black rear-projection screen. Rear projection screen material is pretty much just a specially engineered vinyl that glows through to the other side when its hit with light. It mostly comes in white, ivory, gray, and black. You can get it from any of the major theatrical suppliers or online. I’ve got other articles on the various properties of these colors, but for now, just know that the black screen material is what we want. You don’t need an entire screen – you just need enough to cover your tombstone.
We’re going to cover the entire face of the tombstone with this. All by itself, this solves the problem. Scrooge’s name is now invisible until it lights up. But we can go even farther with this. We can add paint and we can add texture.
The scenic artists on this show did a beautiful job adding moss, cracks, and natural-sponge texture.
The final product was aged and cracked and completely blank until the moment that the Ghost of Christmas Future gestured and Scrooge’s name lit up.
