Making "Neon"

I should also mention that my idea was for them to do this flashlight painting outside in front of some recognizable landmark, but I quickly realized that that would also be pretty unlikely to be able to pull off. The lighting simply wouldn't be controllable. Over the past year I did try to take some of the photographs from the trial session and see if I could mask out the background and just preserve the light writing, then superimpose it over other things, but that proved to be beyond my capabilities.

I wasn't very comfortable that we'd be able to ever do anything interesting.

But when I sat down to formally revisit the idea this year I realized something. While I'd wanted the light painting to spell out Happy New Year, that clearly wasn't a requirement. All they had to do was spell out something that related to the new year. Once I realized that they could just paint 2013 the problem of getting the writing to work seemed solvable.

I did a few more experiments to see if each of them was capable of writing one character with each hand at the same time.