You’re in a nightclub on a Saturday night, you’ve had a drink or two, the DJ is spinning wicked live, and the most incredible guy/girl in the place walks up, and stands at the bar next to you. You (A) lean over and softly say, “Hey babe, are you tired? You’ve been running through my dreams all night.” (B) put on your sexy voice dripping with suggestiveness and ask if you can buy him/her a drink, or (C) don’t notice because you’re too busy watching the light show.
If you answered C, there’s no doubt you wound up kicking yourself later when the hottie left the bar, and you realize you missed another hook up. The good news is you’ve got what it takes to be a lighting jock.
Welcome to Exhilaration
So you want to run lights in a nightclub? Welcome to one of the most exhilarating jobs on the planet. If you are inspired by music, lights, and the atmosphere of a crowd in the mood to party, running lights and video in a nightclub can be as fun and addicting as any extreme sport. This is a job where, if you’re lucky, you’ll be getting paid good money to listen to music and let your creative side play. The hotties decked out in their club garb are just an added bonus.
If you’ve been running lights for theatre or concert acts, you’ll immediately discover some fundamental differences with nightclub lighting. In theatre the rule is often, “the better the lighting, the less you notice it.” In concert lighting, at least everyone is facing the stage. Nightclub lighting is exactly the opposite. Far from the captive audience just waiting to be dazzled, the nightclub audience is free roaming and far more interested in each other than your show. Your canvas is not a set on stage but an entire environment, all 360º of club space. The energy of the music needs be felt no matter which way the audience is facing. To make it even trickier, you’re working live, on the fly. There is no script and no set list. You have to make your rowdy audience respond and you’re not going to do that with subtle color washes and slow fades. To get their attention you’re going to have to slap, poke, and smack those people and then, at exactly the right moment, turn all the lights out on them.
For all their lack of attention, your audience will subconsciously know if you get it right or wrong. Dull, uninspired lights, or an operator that spends more time at the bar than in the booth, can ruin a potentially great evening. A good light tech should be a lightning rod, helping the DJ direct all the pent up energy in the universe into one mighty party.
It’s Not About You
The most important thing about club lighting is, it’s not your show. It’s the DJ’s show. It’s their name on the marquee. If the evening goes badly and drink sales are crappy, it’s the DJ’s job on the line, not yours. With the stakes high, DJs are understandably concerned that the performance goes in the direction they intend. Most of the DJs are glad to have a tech add their own creativity to the show. They are a remarkably gracious group of people who understand that your job requires an equal amount of talent, energy and creativity as their own, and they are happy to let you have your way with it. When a DJ does have request, however, you should do everything in your power to make it happen. Often those requests are about the amount of lighting on the DJ. Some DJs like to be the star of the show while others are more comfortable being heard and not seen. You should plan for both types, and always have a dedicated DJ light available on a dimmer. Beyond that, it’s nice to have some extra, unobtrusive work lights handy (like gooseneck LED Littlites) and a couple of open power strips on a circuit that isn’t already overloaded. Your knowledge and help during set up will build a good working relationship for the show later on. Be friendly, be helpful, and be open to suggestions. Once your DJ is happy, you’re ready to move on to lighting the music.
What makes club lighting work? Energy! The visuals in the room should match the energy of the music. It’s your job to express sound as light and sometimes as visual images. It may seem simple, but there are plenty of light techs who just can’t seem to grasp the concept. Match your visuals to your music. There is a great deal of talent and creativity involved. It is subjective, and while there’s no single way to do it right, there are lots of ways to do it wrong. For example, a big, steady, bass beat lit with twinkling egg strobes and visuals of sparrows in flight is just wrong. What you use will, of course, depend on what you have in your rig. If you are fortunate enough to have hundreds of expensive lights of different types, consider yourself lucky. But even simple rigs have plenty of options if you are aware of the capabilities of each type of fixture you have. Here are a few suggestions for using some of the most common attributes found in most moving lights.
Shutters are Your Friend
A wash fixture with a shutter chase is usually a great way to keep the beat of a song. Most fixtures have several preset shutter speeds including a hyper setting that you can access on the shutter attribute channel. The downside is that you don’t have fine control of the speed and many fixtures lack a “random” setting. Other options include fanning an effect on the strobe channel (and assigning a speed group if your board allows) or building a stack of cues with shutter on and shutter off to run as a chase. Some fixtures have a lamp effect that looks similar to the strobe chase, but the jury is still out on whether that significantly shortens the lamp life. To be on the safe side, stick with the shutter chase since the effect is not that much different — at least not enough that drunken people would notice.
Mixing and Wheeling
Consider yourself lucky if you have fixtures with both color mixing and a color wheel. Color mixing gives you a much greater range of color, but a fixed color wheel allows you to snap between colors, create half colors, or do color spins. If your wheels don’t snap (and this goes for gobo wheels too), try building cues in four steps. First, open the shutter in color one. In the second step, close the shutter and change to color two. The third step is to open the shutter with color two, and the fourth step is to close the shutter and change to color one. The resulting effect is a heavy color bounce, especially if you have light and dark colors or colors on the opposite side of the color wheel. A bounce works well to keep a beat, while spinning the color wheel adds an extra punch of energy on a long build up.
Spinning or Not Spinning
Most fixtures now have at least two wheels with gobo patterns in them somewhere. The second set may be hiding on the effects wheel or even in some cases, (mysteriously), on the color wheel. Two different wheels make layering fun and you can create some unique effects by combining gobos. But remember, your audience will be steadily progressing towards an inebriated state where they can’t walk a straight line, much less look at one. To get your message across, it’s best to keep it simple. Beams work better for club lighting than break ups. Break ups are generally too busy to register, and sometimes they’re so busy that it becomes difficult to tell when they’re rotating. Cones and single solid lines are some of the most effective gobos, but fancier ones are fine too. The same suggestions for color wheels also apply to gobo wheels.
Where Have All the Scanners Gone?
There are two types of automated lights; those with moving heads, and those with moving mirrors, or scanners. The industry seems to be dismissing moving mirror fixtures in favor of moving heads, probably because moving head fixtures have a greater range of motion. But a good rig has an equal number of both moving head fixtures and scanners. A moving mirror fixture allows quick, snap movements that moving head fixtures can’t replicate. The snap is great for expressing beat. A group of fixtures moving in a series of snapping steps with a rotating gobo, strobe or color chase nicely expresses everything going on in a song. A moving mirror fixture on a truss that travels up and down throughout the night is much steadier than a moving head fixture. Big, heavy moving heads can build enough momentum to whip the trusses around. Smaller moving mirror fixtures won’t.
All the Other Stuff (is Just for Conventions)
It wouldn’t be prudent to tell you not to use your frost, focus, and all of the other attributes, but they don’t really have much punch — and club lighting is all about punch. The one exception is the iris. A good iris chase, especially if it can be combined with a zoom chase, makes an eye-catching display to music.
No matter how many or what type fixtures you have, you can create an effective light show if you remember to keep it simple and to use opposites. Some people may not notice that the person they’ve just exchanged numbers with is old enough to be their father (mother) but they will notice strong contrasts like red/blue, strobing/steady, moving/static, and light/dark. Invariably, the best crowd response comes at the end of a long build up of frantic strobe and bright intensity lights. Then, at exactly the right moment, yank every fader on the board down. Silence…darkness. And the crowd goes wild.
Morgan Landrum is the lighting crew chief for the BET Soundstage Club and 8trax.
