While I didn’t dig deep into your fixtures, some general tips on setting up lighting:
1) Have a good combination of washes (broad beam) and spots (narrow beam)
2) Have some good moving lights (moving heads for example)
3) Have some static light, uplighting your own background and walls for example. Colors can be fixed or slowly changing. If they change, make sure it’s coordinated, having each wall change color independently is usually not the nicest effect.
4) Light both downwards (onto the crowd/floor) and upwards. With no obtrusions between light and ceiling the effect can usually be rather big.
5) Last but certainly not least: get a HAZER (not smoke!). This will disperse a permanent very fine mist that you can’t really see with the naked eye (as opposed to smoke), but they small floating drops will light up in the beams of your fixtures, so you get the “rays in the sky” effect. This is by far the best way to ensure maximum effectiveness with your lighting setup.
You could go and rent a hazer for an afternoon (probably get a really good deal from a rental company as weekdays daytime stuff usually sits in the warehouse anyway). Go to some dark hall and set up your lights. Set up a small camera or your use your phone. Run a bit of lights and record it. Then run the hazer for 15-20 minutes and do the same thing. You will immediately notice the profound difference.
Good hazers are not cheap, they are far more expensive than smokers. But where smoke is just an effect of it’s own right (and personally I think cold ice is way more fun and better accepted and longer lasting), a hazer is invisible on it’s own, but it really makes all your other lighting effects shine.
Hope that helps some and my 3 cents as usual.
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