CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, September 09, 2015

Seamless, Fabric SoftDrops Come Up BIG! As They Transport Stonewall Back To 1969

Rosco Spectrum: Our newest backdrop product – Rosco SoftDrop – offers huge, seamless images, in a matte finish, that are printed onto a wrinkle-resistant cotton drop, which is easy to ship, easy to hang and easy to light. Rosco SoftDrop is making its feature film debut in Roland Emerich’s upcoming movie Stonewall, where it solved a number of challenges that the filmmakers faced while making the movie.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Rosco is truly on the cutting edge of technology when it comes to lighting and scenery, and their SoftDrop is no different. This article does come of as a bit biased, which makes sense, as it was written and published by Rosco on their website. However, that little attitude doesn't detract from the quality of the technology on display. Such a little think like wrinkle resistance goes a long way towards making a drop that is unlike anything else we use. No matter how much you stretch most muslin, no matter how taut you can get it, ugly wrinkles tend to rear their head due to prolonged exposure to gravity and human contact, even if it's just a wayward actor bumping into the drop. The matte finish of the fabric is also a dream for a lighting designer, because it allows light to pass through just enough to recognize, giving designers easy control over the specific time of day for each scene, regardless of what it calls for. I hope that one day I can work with material this high quality and make something as affecting as Stonewall appears to be.

Unknown said...

Whenever I see something like I immediately jump to questions about the business. I wonder what Rosco makes on a project like this, and whether they actually found a cost effective way to do that, or if they just charged Stonewall an insane amount of money. I also often find myself wondering about what we could accomplish if money was no issue. Could the design of cheap electric cars come years earlier? Or could the quantum computer that was held stable for an hour be on the market as the latest processor. For years Google has been my favorite company because they ask these questions. I know its not very relevant to theater, but I am glad there is a company out there willing to say "Hey we think age might be cure-able, lets throw a few billion dollars at it and find out." We live in an amazing age of technology and I am excited to see what else we will be coming up with in the near future.