Lighting is essential to making guests feel comfortable on the dance floor and enjoy dancing. The Madison Grapevine philosophy on lighting effects is to make the dance floor the center of attention where guests can enjoy dancing without shining bright, annoying lights at the guests who are taking a break from dancing. To do this, we primarily choose lighting effects that only project onto the ceiling or the dance floor.
Color Pods (included in basic and deluxe lighting package)
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These bright, moonflower effects project multi-colored squares onto the dance floor to set the stage for dancing. They can also rotate in time to the music, but are kept stationary for slow songs. |
Martin Raptor (included in deluxe lighting package)
The Raptor is our favorite lighting effect, perfect for upbeat music. It sequences through 9 gobo patterns, rotating each pattern, and changing the color of the pattern in time to the music. The color prism on the front also switches the projection between a single pattern in the center of the floor, to 3 patterns; each on the left, center, and right side of the floor.
To see a video of the raptor in action, right-click on this Martin Raptor video link, save it to your desktop, and open the video in a player such as Windows Media Player.
12" Mirror Ball (included in deluxe lighting package)
The mirror ball is the one exception to the "no light in the eyes rule". A mirror ball is supposed to project pinpoints of light everywhere. However, we choose the slowest rotating motor possible (1 revolution per minute) and the mirror ball spotlight is positioned far enough away from the ball to keep the pinpoints of light small. And we turn off the light occasionally to keep the effect fresh. Other DJ services, thinking "brighter and faster is better", will often use a faster motor (6 rpm) and position the spotlight close to the ball. This is a mistake because the large, bright, fast moving blobs of light everywhere making the whole room spin. We don't make that mistake.Putting It All Together
To see all of the lighting effects in action, download this 10-second video from a July 2006 wedding by right-clicking the link and saving it to your desktop to view in a player such as Windows Media Player. Yes, this wedding couple loves the "macarena". ;) But we only play the music you want to hear at your event. The Martin Raptor gobo light was projected on the ceiling to make the rotating gobos easier to see in the video. But we typically project it on to the dance floor. The file size is rather large at 10 Megabytes, so it may take awhile for some connections to download.
Download lighting video