We had our first Middle School Fun Night of the year 2 weeks ago. We stopped having middle school dances at Lincoln Lutheran about 4 or 5 years ago after a poorly supervised dance and a poorly done lock-in. But a few years ago we decided to have “Fun Nights” instead. We have a dance, a dodgeball tournament, a game room, snackbar, face painting and photography studio. We let the seniors run everything and they take any profits after everything is paid for. But that’s not what I wanted to write about.
We have the best dance decorations and they take about 15 minutes to setup. I bring in one of our iMacs and a couple of video projectors and we project giant 20ft by 30ft images on the gym walls. You get cool shadows when the kids dance in front of them and a nice variety of images: spacescapes, forest scenes, underwater images and abstract “flurries†shifting and dancing around the walls. Cleanup is easy too.
I had some great drugs before surgery once and saw the same lights! I’m not sure how easy clean-up was tho!
Hehe
Eeew, clean-up from surgery…
Awesome lights! Great idea.
im in ledership n my skoo is
havin a dance on fri 13 but we want it to in volve
velentins to so can you send me pics that yo have
that might match our dance.. thank you
Hi LLoyd,
I am on the decoration committee for the 8th grade graduation party/dance. I found your website/idea on google. This is such a good idea, i just would like to know how you hooked it up etc. The committee needed me to get a little more info. I am not technical at all, but if you could just let me know how you went about it, I can forward it to the department who would take care of this.
Thank you so much.
Love your blog(or is it a website?) – see I am not very savvy with this stuff.
Debi
In the past, I’ve gotten pretty elaborate with the setup; using two computers so that we could seamlessly switch between them when we wanted to change the “decorations”.
Now I just use one computer and hook it up to a few video projectors. We normally use two projectors, but have used three. You can use as many as your video splitter will support.
Connect the video out from your computer (a laptop would work well) to a video splitter. Then connect the projectors to the video splitter and you should be good to go. There are several ways you can get by without a video splitter. You could (a) only use one projector, but that’s no fun. (b) You could have a separate computer connected to each projector. If you have separate computers, you could also display different things on each projector, that might be neat.
We don’t mess with screens; we just project right onto the walls of the gym. And we don’t worry about the fact that the image is distorted because it is projected at an odd angle, that just adds to the festivities.
Make sure you keep the projectors away from the dancers, and it is fun to project low enough to the ground that dancing in front of them casts interesting shadows on the walls. The light from the projectors is more than enough light for the dance, but we turn on a spot light when we do line dances, so that people can see the people who are leading/teaching the line dance.
As far as what to project, any screen saver will do. We usually just use whatever is available on the computer, but we have found a bunch of scary pictures for a Halloween dance. If you have a bunch of pictures of the 8th graders, that might be fun to project for a while.
I hope that helps.
thats cool