HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#107 :: Isbrytare

I was a theater geek in college. Too generally shy (and probably untalented) to translate my run of lead performances in high school productions of "Sound of Music" and "Anything Goes" into acid-tinged audition-winning roles in "Tooth of Crime" and "Romeo and Juliet" against the Machiavellian conniving of pre-professional college-age actors, I contented myself with building sets and rigging lights. My favorite place was the grid - the steel grated rigging floor some 40 feet above the stage, where you used a crescent wrench to bolt bulky, high-wattage arc-lit instruments to pipes, and plug in their fat connectors to the 220-volt control circuits. Powerful, heavy, they vomited light so blindingly hot that you had to tame it with colored gels, barn doors, rheostats and soft focus. I always thought it would be fun to own a few, kept on low power to read by, but they're too huge and costly. A few months ago, I stumbled across this miniaturized marvel at Ikea - a tiny Lekos projector - a powerful halogen lamp with a pair of rails screwed into its snout. It comes with four dichroic glass filters, a set of punched-aluminum gobos (patterns for projecting silhouettes), a few chunks of frosted glass for texture, and a lovely little convex lens - so that you can shoot a blue moose, red windows or an absinthe-green op-art pattern 10 feet high onto your back wall at night - for less than 40 bucks. I almost bought two.