The rules for lighting a concert in front of a camera are quite different than lighting one for the eye. The cameras tend to pick up things that the human eye cannot. Over the years I’ve had to teach myself how to change and adapt my show so it still looks the same to the audience and still looks good on camera. The fact is that this particular evening’s performance is not meant to be perfectly lit for the 15,000 people who bought tickets; it’s for the million people who will view the concert footage.
The main difference between concerts that are lit for an audience versus one that is lit for a DVD is that the concert-goer constantly sees a wide shot of the whole stage while the DVD concentrates on the closeups of individual musicians at key times. The concert designer is normally 100 feet away from the stage and he will not usually notice mistakes that will literally look like crap on camera. As we say in the biz, the camera is unforgiving.
Contamination
Contamination is a word that most concert LDs never have to deal with, but it’s a major concern for every technical director overlooking the shoot. Contamination occurs when different light sources with different colors hit the same subject at the same time. By way of example, consider how an LD uses front light. Often enough, a concert LD will wash the whole stage in a color, say blue. Then he will use spotlights as key lights on performers to make them stand out from the rest of the blue stage. Nobody in the audience notices this because of the spots. But to the camera, the performers will look like blue and white Martians in a distorted picture.
Side lighting can contaminate a shot as well. I love side lighting in a concert. Mixing two separate colors from either side of the stage on a performer can give you a beautiful scene on stage. But if those lights are not colored correctly for a DVD shoot, you get what is often referred to as mud. The camera will show a seriously injured man with one side of his face purple and the other orange. The spots will add white to his eye sockets, forehead and neck to insure that the performer really looks like he’s been in a train wreck. How do you avoid this? Focus the colored front and side lights somewhere the artist isn’t and just use key lights and back lighting on the main band positions.
Avoiding the Talking Head
One of the things I like to avoid is a camera shot that shows nothing but a performer’s head floating in a black background. It looks silly. The eye needs to see something else with which to reference the performer —something in the background that is also lit. This can be a piece of scenery, such as a simple backdrop, or it can be some video elements like a plasma screen or LEDs, like Element Labs’ Versa Tubes, with animated colored patterns on them. Or it can be a shaft of light beaming through some haze. As long as there is something other than just a performer in a shot, it will look better on camera.
Extra lights are often brought in for DVD shoots. You need to light the audience. If you don’t, it looks like the band is playing in an empty black box. Lighting the audience is important to capture the energy of the fans. Directors often call for a “reverse shot.” This is where a handheld camera is pointed at a performer from somewhere upstage of the band. When this happens, the audience is the background for the camera shot. If they are not lit, you end up with a reverse talking head shot. Another director favorite is to pull the jib camera back at the end of the song to reveal the audience cheering. If the audience is not lit, this shot will not work and the director will subsequently go nuclear on the lighting operators.
Extra floor lights are usually requested. It looks nice to see shafts of light in the background. Adding floor lites fills dark holes in the camera shots and makes the whole show look bigger.
Intensity
Intensity levels are also a concern. Different fixtures have different lumen outputs. These output levels often need to be adjusted for cameras. The camera’s iris is affected by the amount of light it sees and you will see “lens flares” in the camera shot if the intensity levels are different. A flare is a hot spot that forces the camera to change its contrast level. The hot spot will become blurred. Basically the artist will be surrounded by a big colored smudge. And again the director will cuss you out for not riding the intensities. For instance, say you are using a 500-watt fixture to front light a musician, but you have a 2000-watt fixture backlighting him at the same time. In order for the camera to see the musician’s face, the iris must be opened to full. But because the back light is so much hotter, the camera will flare and the camera shot will look grainy and distorted.
There are ways to fix this. The long way is to go cue by cue through the whole show and adjust different fixtures for each cue. But that can take days. A more reasonable way is to use inhibitive faders. This is done by taking the levels of certain fixtures down to, say, 70 percent and recording them on a separate fader. Then you make that fader “inhibitive.” When you bring that fader to full, instead of turning on those lights, it only prevents them from ever going higher than 70 percent in intensity. If you see a flare on the camera monitor, you can raise the appropriate inhibitive fader until the flare is gone.
Intensities on spotlights are a major concern. In a normal arena show, I like to see 150 footcandles on a performer to make them pop out on stage. But on a DVD shoot I limit them to 40 to 50 footcandles. Otherwise all the other stage lighting will look dark in comparison to the white hot musician under the spot.
Colors
Many LDs mix too many colors on the stage at the same time. When you add all these colors together, the camera sees brown. Thus your camera shot looks like something your neighbor’s dog might leave on your lawn, not what the LD out front sees. Limit yourself to two or three colors in any look.
Many directors have colors they like and some they despise. Last week I had a guy who hated pinks, magentas and lavenders. The week before I had a director who went ballistic when he saw green or yellow. Again, you don’t want to have to edit your show cue by cue to appease some guy who you already hate because he’s constantly yelling at you. Adjust your color palettes instead. Take all your lights and turn them amber, then record that into your yellow color palette. Now every time you’ve told any light to turn yellow, it will actually be amber.
Last of all you need some haze in the air. Haze will make the light beams stand out. But you must be careful not to overdo it. If there is too much smoke or haze in the air, the close up shots will look foggy, grainy and undesirable.
If you follow these guidelines you’ll not only please the guy with the beret who’s always screaming at the top of his lungs, you’ll also create a great-looking show for the audience, both at home and on the set. Most importantly, you’ll get a call the next time someone needs a good LD for a concert DVD shoot.
