Well we probably need a bit of facelight too and the audience is paying to see these actors so now we veer into tints and color correction. Something like L161, a pale blue with a good jolt of green is going to cut through that dark blue with a crisp sharpness to it allowing you to get great highlights when used as a sidelight or diagonal back (kicker in photography lingo). The L119 is blue and it has a hint of green in it, but not so much that you can't also pull out a rich warmth if you start dimming it. If I use a deep blue for my ambient night, say L119 I have to think very hard about what sort of white that moon should be. We white balance for the eye just like we do for a camera. So now we are getting into theory because a white light does not mean an unfiltered source. OK, we have night and it is blue and romantic, because we are lighting Romeo and Juliet, and we have a moon. And light is only ever defined by shadow. Is night blue or is night dark? Is it the beautiful moonlit night of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet where every shadow should be filled with rich hints of color or are we watching MacBeth follow the knife into the King's bed chamber stark and dark? They are both night but each one has a radically different sense of shadow. Video can be washed out if the stage is improperly lit. Costumes and makeup can be made or ruined by the light and color put on them. A poorly lit performer is harder for the audience to believe. Lighting a set right is the difference between community theater and Broadway. Part of the lighting designer's job is to not only bring their vision to the table, but to make all their other collaborators work look good. We are working with not just the performers, but scenic designers, costume and makeup designers, video, etc. Live performance is inherently collaborative. In photography we could translate that into environmental portraiture perhaps. So where do I start with light on a project? Since most of my work is in dramatic storytelling (opera, theater, dance) I have to consider the where, when, and why of place as much as of person. The tour is much smaller(as it all needs to fit in a 25' truck) so we only have a few dozen lights in that rig but all automated fixture. all controlled by a computer lighting console. For the Lincoln Center gig I've got around 500 lights, 30 of which are automated fixtures that can reposition, color change, project patterns and movement, etc. "Lighting a set right is the difference between community theater and Broadway."įor a sense of scale most photographers start getting overwhelmed by three zones of control and much more than three lights. With that, let's join him mid-stream and eavesdrop at the bar. You can see more images from that opera here, and more examples of Lucas' live performance work, here. The kind of thing where you'd definitely try to grab a stool within earshot and take in as much as you can.įor the sake of this not becoming a giant blob of gray text, I've also included (with permission) some of the photos Lucas took of his work on Madama Butterfly at Opera Colorado in Denver. But as we were just making an L103 detour into the use of color in TV and cinema, I thought this might be the best place to put it.Īs for the material, it is kinda like I was eavesdropping on a late-night conversation between lighting guys at a bar in the Theatre District in NYC. I'm not in the busness of trying to scare people off. It felt a little too info-dense to just drop in as a stand-alone post without proper context. What I got back was basically a firehose/brain dump that gave me a fascinating look into how he thinks. He is also is a photographer, which is how we originally intersected via Twitter.Ī ways back, I wrote to him to find out a little more about how people approach the process of lighting live performances. New York-based Lucas Krech is a lighting designer who works with operas, dances, plays and performance pieces. No worries we'll be back in the center of the bell curve in the next installment. But for others, it'll be a very cool look into the way live performance lighting designers think with respect to color. For some of you this will make your eyes glaze over. Fair warning: we are taking a bit of a deep dive. Today in Lighting 103, a little side trip. Abstract: A dynamic, 3-D scene and hundreds of sources-a talk with a theatrical lighting designer
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