Ok, I’ve seriously fallen off the wagon. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t working. I finished the sign. I had a major setback, however, when I first assembled everything and turned it on. The sign wasn’t readable. I thought the letters would be more readable when more were added—the more letters, the more context, the easier to read. However, the opposite was true. The visual noise from the still-visible inactive lights were overwhelming to the eye, and the result was a mess.
So I bought some gels, and with Rick’s help, we covered up some of the lights with a dark grey gel, which helped a lot. The blue gel looked weird. However, the light that shone through the gel was of a very different character than the original. In the end, the solution I settled on was to paint the light bars black and put electrical tape on the sides of the fluorescents. This was so incredibly tedious, and I was unsure of the final result, that it was extremely demoralizing slow-going as I went along. I’m really happy with the outcome, though. Now I need to film it and show it to people.
