Dancing on a cloud — how to utilize low lying fog to add a bit of magic to your first dance

The music starts playing, a carefully selected song with meaning to the newly married couple, and they approach the middle of the dance floor. As they take each other in their arms and begin to dance, clouds rush in from the edge of the dance floor and quickly fills the space without rising higher than their knees or perhaps their waists.

These clouds, which are a highly specialized fog effect, continue to flow and roll all around them during the entire dance and then quickly fades away when the song ends.

This is "dancing on a cloud", and it's one of our most requested special effects for weddings in Calgary, Red Deer, and Edmonton.

While the low lying fog cloud effect itself can be created a few different ways, it takes specialized SFX equipment and a lot of experience to create that pillowy soft rolling cloud effect.

How is the low lying "cloud" effect created?

So many variables can affect the way the cloud effect looks, not limited to whether you are indoors or outdoors, how much humidity is in the air, whether or not the venue has air conditioning running (or even just fans) - even how big the space is and how many people will be in the room.

We have a variety of machines that can create low lying clouds; with each one using a different method to produce the effect:

1. A traditional fog machine with the fog being passed through a chiller box containing regular ice or dry ice (sometimes this chiller box is built in, sometimes it's a stand alone piece of equipment)
2. A machine that uses dry ice (solid CO2/carbon dioxide)and hot water to create a large amount of CO2 based fog that is extremely cold
3. A machine that uses pure water and a powerful fog machine, and combines the two using ultrasonic agitators to create a low fog effect with a large amount of fog
4. A machine that uses liquid carbon dioxide, and a very powerful fog machine to create immense amounts of low fog

Each of these machines and methods creates a similar effect, but the differences in the way each creates the effect makes each option well suited to specific events and situations.

The method/equipment we choose to create your cloud effect informed by a number of things:

1) Is the event indoors or outdoors?

Outdoor events require more powerful fog machines than we would normally need indoors - and the weather has to be perfect... any amount of wind and your low lying fog will just blow away.

2) What kind of fire alarm sensors are used in the venue?

This is important! Many venues use traditional smoke detector style sensors which would need to be bypassed, and many of them (especially hotels) just outright disallow the use of fog machines as a result. And rightfully so - they don't want to evacuate a hotel full of guests because of your wedding, and YOU definitely don't want to pay the bill associated with a fire department response.

For hotels and venues with sensitive fire alarms, we would select a dry ice based machine that creates a thick cloud that is purely water vapour with no particulates that could set off your venues fire alarm.

3) How big is the area you want to cover with the cloud effect?

Obviously the larger the area, the more powerful the fog machine we utilize needs to be, or we need to use more than one. We have machines that can fill a small to medium sized dance floor, as well as machines that can fill spaces as large as a hockey arena; so we can get the job done no matter the size of your venue's dance floor.

Low lying fog pairs perfectly with Sparkular™ cold sparklers!

Fountains of sparks just look more magical when they erupt from low lying clouds on a dancefloor. It's a scientific-ish fact.