I'm struggling to come up with the proper name for what I call "a light grid". Many music videos feature a wall of lights behind the artist. Where can you rent these things and what are they called? I've debated building my own, but i'm sure it won't be cost effective and won't render nearly the same effect.

Input would be mucho appreciato'ed.

Chris

Not sure what you saw, but that's not what a "lighting grid" is. A lighting grid would refer to a system mounted on the ceiling of either a studio or theatre space where stage lights can be hung. They are usually made of either 1 1/2" black pipe or unistrut track.

Now that thats established, do you have any idea what the wall of lights behind a performer could be called? These things have to be rentable I would think!

What you refer to is a Lighting Truss system.
Here is a site to get you started it was the first site in a Google search.
http://www.litestructures.co.uk/hire/hi_light.htm
It may give you some search ideas.

Mr. Bill

Do you mean something like this? http://web.mit.edu/storborg/ddf/index.html

But mounted vertically on a wall?

Chris,

This article might be of interest to you. Michael Keeling is the lighting designer of many famous videos like Lenny Kravitz's "Are you Gonna Go My way" and Justin Timberlake's "Rock your body". Videos which basically use "light walls".

http://www.framemag.com/articles/article,4731.html

He also designed the LED light wall for the Cold Play video on this page:

http://www.a52.com/

Chris, your description doesn't give us enough information to answer the question, as evidenced by the variety of replies here! A picture is worth a thousand words....

I think he means one of these (http://extranet.mole.com/public/index.cgi?cmd=view_item&parent=-1899-1900-1905-1915-1927&id=11806). A large bank of PAR64's (http://extranet.mole.com/public/index.cgi?cmd=view_category&parent=-1899-1900-1905-1915&id=1927) in this case a 24 light Moleeno. There are also six lights, nine lights, twelve lights. There are variations on these using MR16's. Great units but require a lot of juice, not the kind of thing you plug into your wall. Very popular in music videos, also for live shows too.

There are smaller PAR 36 units (http://extranet.mole.com/public/index.cgi?cmd=view_category&parent=-1899-1900-1905-1915&id=1928) that take FAY daylight bulbs that are the poor man's HMI, they are 650 Watts. The PAR64's are 1K each.

Or I could be wrong, I couldn't see any of the links.