LOR Simulated Candle Flicker effect - Video

[Guest guest]

This is a short SILENT 38 second video I shot of my 5 Halloween Jack O' Lanterns to show how the candle flicker effect works. I created this effect for use with them for Halloween 2010 utilizing a single C7 night light (4 watt) incandescent bulb in each Jack O’ Lantern. The smaller Jack O' Lanterns are much brighter due to the light has a smaller area to illuminate. I usually use a lower intensity on these 2 end Jack O' Lanterns to match the intensity of the larger ones. The middle and largest Jack O' Lantern does appear dimmer than the others, this is because of this same effect, instead of less area to light, there is more area to illuminate, so it appears dimmer than the others. I actually need to put in a larger bulb inside the larger Jack O' Lantern to compensate for this and make him more uniform to the others.



This effect also works very well with L.E.D. lights, it does however, require the intensities to be lowered a bit more for best results when utilizing L.E.D.'s. I do use this effect on my L.E.D. (Orange, Purple and White) L.E.D. light strings as well.



This is just an animation sequence I created with the LOR S2 Sequence software, so again, there is no audio in the video with the exception of what the camera microphone may have picked.



Check out the video below for how this effect looks and works. Sorry the quality isn't as good as I'd like, but trying to take video in a darkened room with just the lighting effect, this was the best I could get it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYM2CZJEXtA&hl=en&fs=1

Here is the animation file if someone wants to take a look at how I accomplished this effect:






Attached files Flickering Jack-O-Lanterns.las

[evandewindt]

hey thanks for the post! that saved me a little bit of work this year!

[Guest guest]

evandewindt wrote:

hey thanks for the post! that saved me a little bit of work this year!

Glad it helped you out!:cool:

[MikeH]

Great job Orville, you have a lot of patience.

MikeH

[Guest guest]

MikeH wrote:

Great job Orville, you have a lot of patience.

MikeH

You might not convince some folks of that around here.

But, yes, it did take some time to get the effect down just the way I wanted it to look, came out even better than I expected it too.

Some folks would just say, use a flicker bulb and just turn on the channel, I have huindreds of flicker bulbs that I bought and used in my static displays, which were fine for that type of display, but I wanted better control of how the flickering effect looked, especially since a true flicker bulb can never be as bright as a standard C7 night light bulb.

So I just kept playing around with it until I got several different variations of the effect that looked good using varying intensities along with varying fades of the shimmer effect, along with turning off the channel for a very short time to make it appear the "candle" inside the Jack O' Lantern blew out, but didn't.

I never kept track of how many actual hours it took me to get the candle flicker effect just right, just know I think I spent about 1-1/2, possibly up to 3 days on it initially, but I still continue to tweak it in each new musical sequence I may use it in, some sequences I'll use the twinkle effect, some I use a combination of twinkle, solid fades, on/off and shimmer fades all with varying intensity settings, just depends on the song and what I want the Jack O' Lanterns to do. Most often I just use it to have them lit when a part of a sequence is needed to be dark, this way my display is never completely 100% dark at any time. Plus I use some other animated lights with their own controller that are on all the time and not connected to a LOR channel for this reason as well.

I also use this for short fillers between sequences/shows if needed, I also use it for after the musical aspect of the show is over to randomly light each item in my display using very low insenities until morning, when my off-hours music starts.

[Andy Gonzales]

thanks for posting this.

I plan on using it next year for a two channel flame effect and adpating it to my six channel RealTree (six strings draped around the trunk of a real spruce tree)

Andy, Gonzales Light & Sound Co.
www.glights.org

[Andy Gonzales]

thanks for posting this.

I am adapting it into a two channel flame effect for Halloween and a six channel RealTree (six strings of lights, 2 alternating colors, draped around the lower trunk of a real spruce tree.

Andy
Gonzales Light & Sound Co.
www.glights.org

[Guest guest]

Sorry the video isn't there any longer. But I closed my YouBoob account because they tend to strip music from the videos. Even though this one had no sound, closing my account meant deleting all videos I had on YouTube.

I now use Vimeo and don't have those issues. I need to find the candle flicker video and put it on Vimeo as I don't think it's there, but I do have some videos on Vimeo that do use this flickering effect (Halloween).

They can all be found here:
http://vimeo.com/groups/109696