So once again I have a band that has been talked into buying some UV painted drops for their stage set. And once again I find myself thinking about the con man who just made a pretty penny peddling garbage.
These UV painted drops do look cool at times. But what nobody ever tells the purchaser of such items is that to see them properly, one must make sure all other lights in the room are dim and that youneed to use a shit load of Wildfires (UV light fixtures) to illuminate them to half as bright as the renderings they will show you are.
This week I'm out designing the lighting for Fall Out Boy's winter tour. The artistic director is a great guy. And he has seen some good UV drops in the past, he swears to me. So he had 2 – 30'high x 20' wide drops made to correspond with the band leaders ideas of a painted drop. So I call the company manufacturing these drops to ask them point blank how many black lights I would need to make the gag work, for the drops to really pop under the UV light. He assures me that lighting the drop with 2 x 400watt Wildfires from the top and 2 from the bottom would be more than enough.
I am a skeptic and have tried in vain to make these drops look as good as the renderings they sold the band on. So I double the amount of UV light fixtures recommended. I hang the drapes and put out my wall of Wildfires. I turn them on and wait about 5 minutes to see the UV paint take effect. Something starts to glow but I am unsure of what it really is I am looking at. Now I am getting confused so I have every light in the arena turned off. I can now see a little resemblance to what I thought I was getting.
But of course this is not what the band paid for. They ask if I can double up on the amount of UV lights. Sure I say, for a mere extra thousand bucks per week we can do it. The accountant quickly puts the kabash on that idea. He is right in a way. We have just spent 40k on a paint job that looks little like what the band visualized. How much more money does one want to waste on this silly concept?
These UV drops have been around for 10 years or so now. I wonder if some artists are better at working with them than others? But for my thinking this is a failed concept left over from someone's teenage black light poster era. Must be some good looking ones in Vegas I'm guessing. Somewhere where they have a budget for a full truss full of UV lites.
As for the salesman that peddle these items, well they have a job to do. It's not their fault. Hell, they probably believe these things look really cool. But I have yet to see one of these really look good. Put the bong down fellas.
