Which was exactly the problem facing lighting designer Rob Halliday, lighting Is There Life After High School?, a small scale musical at the tiny Bridewell Theatre - a converted swimming pool in the City of London. "High School is quite a delicate show, with the songs interspersed by unnaccompanied soliloquies delivered by members of the cast, all of whom are un-miked. That, and the Bridewell's clear acoustics, meant that noise became a major consideration for us - to the extent that at various points in the show we were even turning off colour scrollers to minimise the background noise."
Key moments of the production called for haze, however, and after trying a conventional haze machine and immediately rejecting it as being too noisy ("every time we turned it on, the cast and director would look accusingly at us!") Halliday called Roger Hennigan at White Light for advice. Hennigan suggested the Unique variable haze machine from Look Solutions.
"This is a truly remarkable machine," comments Halliday. "The haze it created fitted the show and the venue perfectly. More importantly, it was to all extents and purposes silent. The location of the machine meant that it was only about three feet from some parts of the audience, but even in those seats it was inaudible, allowing us to create the haze effects we needed without affecting the performances at all." Control in this case was by an operator next to the machine, but the Unique hazer also offers separate DMX control of the pump and fan speed, allowing a wide range of effects from the finest haze to the thickest of fogs to be achieved easily.
In addition to its appearance at the Bridewell, the machine has been used on shows including Grease and The Leader of the Pack and at the Belfast Opera House, the Young Vic and the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith. The Unique hazer, together with Look Solutions' Tiny-Fogger and the full range of smoke machines from The Smoke Factory are now distributed in the UK by White Light, and are available now to purchase or on hire.