Before we get into all of the technical details of different lighting protocols and how they work, establishing a healthy idea of what lighting design is might be helpful. The design is going to effect a lot of properties like what type of lighting fixture to use, color, texture and placement of the fixture. A good lighting designer doesn’t just start hanging lights and adding random colors that they think would look cool, but instead a lighting designer needs to look at what the project entails. If they are doing a theatre piece they must read it, understand it, and have a conversation with the director about the emotion, time and atmosphere of the play or musical. Maybe this particular lighting designer is working in a concert setting. Listening to the music beforehand or understanding the genre of the band that is playing is incredibly important. But the concert lighting designer might not even be able to listen to the music! They instead need to create a design that is flexible and can change based on the live performance. No matter the type of lighting the architecture of the space is going to drastically change where to place the fixtures. This architecture could be built into the performance venue or it could be added staging as in a scenic design for a musical or play. And that is just a little bit of the problems that lighting designers face when working! There is a lot of information to keep track of as a lighting designer and for beginning designers it can be quite stressful. I’m going to break down how I design and my thought process. With a little bit of practice it gets a lot easier to manage all of the little nuances within designing!
I first would like to start with a definition of what I think a good lighting design does for an audience. This definition is purely opinion and as a designer works in the industry it can certainly change. But it’s a good framework to start to wrap our mind around. I believe the importance of lighting is to create atmosphere above everything else. There’s emotion in light. Red is frightening, blue is calming and pink might show love or playfulness. These colors and their association with emotion is deeply ingrained in our culture and who we are as human beings. When there is lighting on stage, on objects or even in the outside world I think of it as a fabric that drapes onto the objects and people. It adds to the form that it is shining on and gives it a brand new look. But we as lighting designers need to make sure that we keep this atmosphere contained. It’s easy to create cool effects and have a bunch of different colors but the lighting needs to add to the atmosphere on stage. If there is a play where a girl and guy are falling in love red lighting that is shooting up on them from a low angle might be the wrong way of representing their growing passion. But maybe that would work in a murder scene. It’s all in the atmosphere of the theatre piece or concert. Lighting shows time, space and change over a given piece of work and that is all attributed to atmosphere. For a concert setting some songs can be warm or cold, sad or happy, or angry or peaceful. With those words there are images of color that we can play with in lighting. When I listen to music or read a play I get images in my mind of what they look like and the feelings that they give me. For me it’s very easy to see the music and feel what color it should be. It’s also a skill that gets more developed over time as new ideas emerge.
Planning and Plotting
UWM’s Production of 12 Ophelias (Lighting design by: Stephen Roy White, Scenic design by: N. T. Johnson)
The theater can be an intimidating place to start working. For the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee’s production of 12 Ophelias there were about 152 lights hung in the air to be able to cover the whole stage. That can be a lot to keep track of for a designer. But to make it easier to determine where lights need to be and what angles, lighting designers often simplify their design by using a Lighting Key as a way to plan before moving onto a light plot. This example key is very simple. Imagine a person is in the center and the arrows are where the light is coming from. With this key I’m imagining a scene in the play where it’s beginning to become a sun rise. On each of the arrows I put a color that will be put into a light. Then what I can do from there is test it under lights in a smaller setting to make sure that I get the feeling of a sunrise. This step is also good as a research phase. Always look up pictures of ideas that you want to replicate so that you can get it as accurate as possible. Young designers often guess what natural lighting looks like and it’s never quite right. Even though you’ve seen a sunrise a thousand times it doesn’t mean you remember all of the details that make it realistic!
That is an example of a plot that I created in class. The red lines represent pieces of the scenery that I was imagining and then I had to figure out where I was going to put my lights! A light plot shows the master electrician where to hang the lighting fixtures and what type they are. This document serves as a working document for grouping, numbering and patching these fixtures. It can also contain what dimmers the fixtures are plugged into.
This is a closer view of the plot. I also turned on the different pools of light that are seven feet in diameter. This is where I want the lights to be pointed at. It is common practice to overlap these circles of light to allow for the best amount of coverage available. To start filling in the plot, it is helpful for us to refer to the lighting key. Imagine that each pool of light needs to have the same angles of light that your lighting key does. For this plot the pink circles have a lighting key that has back, font, right side, left side, and top light. Every pink circle needs to have five lights pointing in the different directions to reach the center. But it can’t be any old lights we need to use math to help us determine what lights we should be using and their placement.
This chart shows the distance at the top for how far the light is traveling and the other numbers are the diameters of the pools of light at that given distance. For this chart the lighting instruments being used are in the ETC Source Four family of fixtures. A different chart and specifications would be used for other brands of lights. The designer needs to do the math in order to pick the lighting fixture that will create about a 7 foot diameter circle of light. The Pythagorean theorem is a lighting designers best friend in determining the hypotenuse of the triangle. (Also you could use x√2 as the hypotenuse. Where x is the floor or vertical distance) The ‘A’ and ‘B’ sides are the floor distance and the vertical distance from the light to the ground. The goal is to create a 45-45-90 triangle for each fixture so that they all blend together because they are at the same angle. Also this is generally the most flattering way to light up someones face without there being shadows that might make the subject look older. Hanging three lighting instruments using this method helps make the subject look like they have a lot of dimension since the light is surrounding them versus having one side of them lit up. That is big deal especially when working in a thrust theatre space like the MainStage Theater at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee.
After the Plot
The design is then hung in the air after the light plot has been finalized. All lights get plugged into circuits or if they are DMX devices like LEDs get plugged into the network. All lights get color, and if it’s necessary get a gobo which is a texture that is added into the light. It is then up to the designer to control all of the fixtures and create the cues based on the show they’re working on.
Creating a lighting design can be a very long and tedious process. Going from reading the play-research-lighting key-lighting plot-hanging lights-circuiting-coloring-adding gobos-patching and programing cues for the given show. But it is a very rewarding process when it all comes together.
Next week we are looking into our first protocol- DMX! Thanks for reading!
References:
Gillette, J. Michael, and Michael McNamara. Designing with Light: an Introduction to Stage Lighting. McGraw-Hill Companies, 2014.