Light moves. Unless you spend all your time in an office with florescent lighting, the light around you shifts. The sun traverses the sky. Leaves on the trees blow in the wind and lend movement to dappled light. Shadows change.
When considering leaves and trees or clouds we must consider how they move. Abstract patterns have even more movement options available to them. And when the stage is filled with haze and fog, the movement of the light becomes quite a dynamic thing indeed.
Templates hold a degree of interest on their own but as static objects they can fast become, well, static. Motion gives life and vitality to templates that they might otherwise not have. If movement is required to create the right emotional environment then we must, as designers, be able to clearly and carefully select the best movement options available to us.
First up is rotation. Whether you are dealing with a template in a moving light with rotation ability, or a standalone fixture like the GAM TwinSpin or Rosco Double Gobo Rotator, rotation is a powerful tool for the lighting designer. Spinning templates can be a lot of fun for music events, bands, and the like. This is often what people first think of when they imagine a rotating template. However, rotating templates can have some powerfully subtile effects as well. Placing a static leaf or cloud pattern in a light with an abstract rotating template behind it can give a slight sense of movement without overpowering a composition. Getting the focus just right, such that the rotation recedes to the background, is critical in these cases.
Linear movement is another wonderful way to create motion with templates. Whether it is the vertical rise of flames or the slow horizontal shifting of clouds, linear motion, like that created by the GAM Film/FX, can be wonderful. These effects, like rotation effects, require a very careful attention to focus if you are trying to achieve any degree of subtlety. It is too easy to make these effects look like effects and not like an integrated part of a larger composition.
While discussing movement we should not overlook two very simple means of moving light around stage. First is lamp intensity. You may have subtle fades and builds of the light or a rapidly flickering disco effect, but either way, modulating the intensity of your templates is an easy way to give movement to them. The second kind of movement is a physical relocation of the beam of light. Typically achieved through the use of moving lights, this is another way to give dynamic movement to light. Then again, there is nothing like giving a baton of leaf templates a gentle shove to simulate a gust of wind.
Where things get really interesting is in how you combine these various qualities of movement. If you are lighting a dance floor, you might have your moving lights ballyhoo while rotating an abstract template with an intermittent strobe effect. But perhaps you are working on something more subtile, the night scene in an opera. You may have several GAM Film/FX slowly scrolling soft focused clouds across the sky while they subtly shift in intensity modulating up and down during the scene. Each choice may be the right one in the right context. But I have a hard time believing Mimi would look right with a strobing Technobeam overhead.
How you use and combine qualities of movement with templates will make the difference between an effect and a composition element. Carefully considering what quality of light you want will guide your design decisions and lead you to a solution that is more than just flickering dots bouncing around the stage.
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Abstract gobos can be particularly good for delineating location in large musicals. While a full scenic shift is great, augmenting that with a total transformation in the lighting environment can truly make the difference in a production. Linear patterns that drape over scenery or scrape across walls create quite a different effect than geometric shards of lights cast across the floor. Abstract breakups like R77764, focused very soft, lightly highlighting scenery or perhaps a framed photograph or poster, can really bring that element to life.
Abstract templates are fantastic for providing a sense of architecture and place to a scene, party, or music show. A simple change in gobo, from leaves to a geometric template for example, can tell us quickly that the action has moved from outside to inside. A pattern projected on walls and ceilings can fast give light a direct connection to a theme party or event. Whatever your situation, the use of abstract templates are very powerful.
With a live act, the kind of template used can be guided by the style of music being played. A techno band might want more linear shapes, perhaps circuit board patterns or something to that effect. A psychedelic jam band on the other hand may call for more swirly organic shapes. Intuition and feel are your best guides when working with music. 
Cloud templates come in several varieties and each have their benefits and drawbacks. Standard steel, like with leaves, provide a cookie cutter cut out of a shape that, with the proper attention to angle and sharpness can be either cartoonish or subtle. Even a template as silly as R78169 can, with the proper focus, turn into a very powerful effect when designing a sky. 
The first concern is the shape of the gobo. Sadly, this is something that is too often overlooked when considering a template for use in a production. When I say shape of template I do not mean the exact shape of the leaves themselves, but the overall shape of the pattern. As you can see from the example of R77732 the pattern has a round shape overall. No matter how you point the light, no matter how much softness, this template will always look round. While this might not be a concern in certain styles of production, or when you have a full stage wash on, it does become a concern for more naturalistic compositions. If you want to vary the intensity of the individual lights to pull focus to a certain area of the stage you will end up with little circles of leaves of varying intensity. Worse still, if you just want to turn on a single light, you end up with a circle of leaves which looks hokey at best.
When using a template like R77774 there is no concern that the template will look round. In fact it is impossible to focus the light in such a way that a single instance of the template appears round. The potential pitfall with these style templates is that you often need more physical instruments creating a tighter beam overlap in order to get a clean full stage look. The benefits of not having a round dot of leaves, however, far outweighs the need for greater precision in drafting, hang, and focus. There are plenty of examples of non-round templates but they are definitely the minority when it comes to leaf patterns.
Once the shape consideration has been resolved you need to consider density. Our example above of R77774 is great for more open sun filled compositions. The template lets a lot of light through while still maintaining the character of light through trees. But perhaps you want your templates to be more of an accent. Perhaps all that light, and the varied size of the spaces between steel, is not the right look. A template like R77733 gives a more uniform, dense, feel the the light. Similar in density to the R77732 noted above, this template shares with R77774 the characteristic of not being round. What density of template is wanted will be determined by the dramatic needs of the scene in question.
