It’s winter again, which means t’is the season for trade shows — the time of year when new products like automobiles, housewares and electronics fill the convention centers of America. And somebody has to light them.
For a couple of weeks, I have been stationed downtown at a radiology convention in Chicago where miles of x-ray machines are exhibited for thousands of doctors to gawk at. There are all kinds and sizes of manufacturers booths here. I am working on one that is huge — two football fields long — filled with products, projectors, plasma screens and lights. I’m paid to make stuff look nice, and I will accomplish that — because I really care. Why?
Because, as I walk around this massive space, I notice how many booths are poorly lit. It’s as if lots of lighting designers with huge budgets didn’t give a crap how their booths really look. I see booths with over 100 moving lights, and they’re just filled with lighting fixtures applied incorrectly, the wrong sized lenses and poorly focused zooms. Maybe I have an eye for bad lighting, and maybe the public doesn’t care, but I think it’s shameful.
The Rules
There seems to be some unwritten rules about booth lighting. I doubt anyone teaches a course in this; we just learn from seeing what others do. But I have to think that some of these rules are valid, and some are just stupid. There is one rule that can’t be ignored, and just about everyone gets this point: Light the product.
In the case of auto shows or this particular event, white light is king. But your white light needs to be way brighter than the ambient light in the room. If you’re smart, you’ll have someone in a lift unplug the convention center lights over your booth. This makes your product stand out more when it is bathed with white light.
But there are several types of white light. Prominent in many places are arc PARs. These are DMX512-controlled PARs with an arc source and a power supply built in, with an extremely bright white light output. They can throw a tight beam 50 feet with no problem, and can be great for auto shows. But they pose problems for other shows, mainly because most of them can’t be dimmed. In the case of this radiology show, all the products are connected to monitors that show x-rays of people’s bodies. If the lights are not placed in the perfect place on a truss and focused just right, they produce glare in the eyes of the doctors trying to view the equipment. Glare on a computer screen is a big no-no.
When that happens, the clients complain. And you have no choice but to douse that light or focus it someplace else. So, I prefer old-fashioned ETC Source Four PARs with a dimmer. I will color correct them with a CTB gel to make them look white instead of brownish. Now, if a client com-plains that it is too bright or they can’t read a computer screen, you simply dim the light to an acceptable level.
The other choice is to use moving light fixtures with arc sources. These will give you that white beam with dimming. Plus, if it is offending anyone, you simply refocus it a few feet one way or another. The big bonus of using moving lights is that you do not need guys in lifts focusing for days. The caveat is that if you are going to use them, you must choose the correct lens and fixture for each application.
These conventions have giant booths with all kinds of scenic elements and structures to illuminate. The one thing you can count on is that their company logo will be prominently displayed — and they want it lit for good reason. You have to pick the correct fixture with the correct lens size to cover the logos (I prefer ETC lekos to light signage and logos). You can easily choose and replace the lens of these fixtures to make sure that the entire logo is covered evenly. Someone in a lift will focus it and soften the edges of the beam so the letters of the logo seem to glow brighter than its surroundings.
What Were They Thinking?
Now I’m looking at a booth and laughing. Some LD has taken three hard-edge moving lights and focused them at a company logo. I am staring at three big white circles that are overlapping the logo. It looks like crap. The LD chose fixtures without framing shutters and didn’t place the same amount of lumens evenly across the logo. There are three giant hot spots, and parts of the logo are not lit. What irks me is that the three fixtures will cost the client US$1,200 for a two-week rental. Two lekos would have cost a tenth of that and done the job properly.
Another thing that slays me is when I see stock gobo usage on carpets and walls for no reason other than to show someone what a light can do. There ought to be a fine for unnecessary gobo usage.
Now I’m staring at a booth with white carpet. The whole booth is bathed in nice white light — a good job done by someone. But I look down, and I see this red stock VL1000 gobo of bricks. It’s moving around slowly in circles, and there are several more fixtures doing the same thing. Why? I can barely see them. No doctor here cares about them.
But wait; there’s more. The booth next door has blue carpet. I look down and barely make out a beam of light with a gobo and a green gel that makes it almost invisible. Did somebody really get paid to design this?
Corporate logo gobos are another story. Salesman love to sell these for placement in moving lights. I guess some LDs or clients think that having these white letters floating around their booth is just cool, so I’m forced to do this several times a year at these shows. I think it’s sometimes neces-sary to have these to light a flat surface of the booth, but logos floating around the floor and spinning is just so passé.
I like to add color to set pieces. Every corporate client has a company color — it’s in their signs and packaging. They usually like to see carpet and signs that are lit in their color hanging in the booth. Right now, I’m walking by a booth with large white bare walls. Some LD has chosen a 40-foot-wide row of LED strip lights to color it and has failed miserably. There are streaks of color with different levels of saturation lining the wall, giving it a look of green dog vomit. Either nobody has focused these 20 strips, or they chose the wrong fixtures for the job. Four Martin MAC Wash lights with barn doors would have been the right fixture choice.
When I design these things, I live in fear that it will be underlit. Always bring plenty of extra fixtures and leave spare circuits everywhere you can, as inevitably, the client will move some products around in the booth. As the LD, you must find some way to light it, and you never know which knucklehead writer is going to walk by and critique your work.
Nook Schoenfeld is a freelance knucklehead and lighting designer who can be reached at nschoenfeld@plsn.com.
