The director wanted hand-held props that looked sharp enough to stone someone, but glowed from the inside.
About the project
A lighting designer friend needed internally lit rocks for a contemporary ballet. The artistic director wanted them sharp and jagged. They had to look like they could stone someone to death, but fit in one hand.
I hiked outside Denver and collected stones that fit the aesthetic and my 3D scanner. Scanning them let me scale the models up to the size of about a pineapple. I modeled a universal sled that locked into the base of any rock. A custom puck slid inside, holding the battery, the decoder, and the pixel tape. During the run, the live network choked the 2.4GHz decoders, causing some units to freeze on stage. I never used 2.4GHz for show control again.
The design worked because every part of it was modular. I printed the clear PLA shells at five percent infill to keep the brightness high, and built the internal hardware to slide out with a single threaded cap.
- ArtNet
- Blender
- Custom Fabrication
- FDM 3D Printing
- Pixel Mapping
- Rapid Prototyping
- SPI
- WLED
- TCP/IP
- ELM
- 3D Scanning
- Lighting Design
- Wire-to-Board Soldering
- Power Distribution
Gallery
