Pushing the limits with LUMIPro

As you might have noticed by 3 of the 9 bulbs in L3 projection lighting being spot lights, i have a certain special love for theater. I've personally shot a tremendous amount of live theater RL and the high contrast, pop in colors, and the challenge of capturing live photography has always been a love of mine.

With the revival of burlesque in SL, i've enjoyed going to many shows. I had a chance to see SteamDolls at Shadow's Gentleman's club recently and fell in love with the 6 dancers doing some really cool choreography with a great set, custom music, and special effects. I had a chance to meet Shadow Tarber, creative director and lead dancer for the show, and gave her a demo of L3 and asked if we could take a crack at shooting one show with performers wearing the L3 lights. She said yes.


With curtain at 6pm we met the performers at the 5pm call and had all the performers wear the L3 lights with both point lights and projectors. Lights were set to Rembrandt and projectors set to medium spot all with a very common violet hue used in live theater (the theater lighting pro i work with RL says they NEVER use a straight white light EVER on stage (ok there are expections i'm sure)).

I asked colleen Criss, LUMIPro's business manager and also partner with Toran in Babenco & Criss Machinima and Photography if they wanted to video shoot the performance while i shot stills. The results honestly was darn impressive.

This is pushing the limits of SL for live work. With Toran and I both having overclocked GPUs with multi-core CPUs working thier butts off with ultra settings with 6 performers, 20 in the audience, in high animation with 18 point lights, 6 projectors, full shadows, and me running DOF. I crashed once on DOF and Toran ran the entire show without a glitch.

Want to see SteamDolls live? Check out the SteamDolls show schedule by clicking here. The address of the theater is here.

(click the images to see them full screen. watch the video)