A 'Half-Cyc' Projection is built to fade to transparent at roughly the halfway mark vertically, only projecting imagery on the top half of the screen or cyc. I have found that many production companies project background visualizations directly onto the cyc, thus 'Half-Cyc'!

Many of the theaters I have worked with have usually asked some variation of the same question during the process of creating backgrounds. "How do I keep the projection off of the actors faces?" or "...off of my sets?". This lead to creating the 'Half-Cyc' design. This way, you can project an image, and light the set and actors normally. The stage lights and the fade of the projection blend perfectly to allow for normal set design, with the additional benefit of background projection!

First and foremost, I am a much smaller operation, it's just me and sometimes my wife helping out. I make projections for shows because I love theater, and my whole website is about making content for the things I love!

Second, I found that when helping out with shows in the past, I was unhappy with the quality of background projections. They were too ... clip-arty. I wanted to create something for my shows that was more like the background paintings used in movies and Disney animations in the past. I want my paintings to feel alive.

Lastly, my licensing. I absolutely hate that when licensing most content, you only have access for a slim period of time. When I first started out, I unfortunately mimicked this industry standard, but learned during the pandemic that flexibility and understanding was how I wanted to practice. To that end, all of my licenses are perpetual. If you run another production of Legally Blonde in 5 years, you should be able to use the artwork you licensed this year. All my work gets a perpetual license by default to the theater, production company or director that licenses it.

My recommendation is a program called OBS Studio. Which is an open source, cross platform, and free utility that, while primarily built for broadcasting, works great for directing projections to screen, and scene switching.

Obviously, something like QLab is a go to for this, but not all theaters, schools or productions can use Mac devices, which is why I prefer OBS.