Light Tubes

Daniel Smith · October 9, 2008

Hi.

I am the LD for an upcoming live studio show at my college, and I'm trying to get hold of some wall lights like the ones shown here:

(Straight from the Strand lighting web site)

I was talking to a sessional tutor today called Luker Rollie, and he is against neons as they are expensive and fragile. I was looking into fluorescents for price.

However he mentioned a plastic tube light, but couldn't remember the name of it. Apparently it's cheap, durable and you don't have to mess around with a ballast etc. I'm just wondering if anyone here knows what these are called.

The other option of course is to buy a barrell or bendy strip light, although I really like the idea of a perfectly straight rigid tube to hang, as I'm not sure I'll have a backdrop to screw into yet.

Any suggestions from anyone, baring in mind I am from the UK, I am willing to rent aswell if anyone knows anywhere good that does this kind of stuff (in the London/Kent area).

Cheers

Dan.

Jamie Metzger · October 9, 2008

I worked on something recently where we used single kino bulbs with splitters and wrapped the tubes in colored cellophane from a party store. ($10/100ft !)

We drilled holes in the wall to hide the wiring and used fishing line for some, but majorally black paper tape to hold them up there. It worked great!

Kino does make colored bulbs, but they are expensive. You can go the cellophane router and use snot tape or clear packing tape to hide the seams.

Lee Filters makes a plastic tube/sleeve with the color you want in there. They were $15.95 for 2/4' and $29.95 for 8'.

Roscoe makes a plastic sleeve that isn't much cheaper, i think $13.95. Now you can see why we used cellophane.

Daniel Smith · October 9, 2008

Yeh I've seen some fluorescent coloured sleeves but again, they are about £8 EACH. So I'm just going to wrap them in gel.

Jamie Metzger · October 9, 2008

Yeh I've seen some fluorescent coloured sleeves but again, they are about £8 EACH. So I'm just going to wrap them in gel.

Like I said, check into a party store. Cellophane is so much cheaper than buying gels.

When you do the math about how many cuts you can get out of a regular sized piece of gel, it starts to get expensive. Using cellophane we were able to wrap 8' tubes and we had plenty left. I'd look into it to save money.