On Feb. 27, the Broadway Green Alliance (BGA) held a Green Lighting Workshop at the Loews Theater at New York University. For the uninitiated, the BGA is a New York-based group of working theatrical professionals who are dedicated to reducing the environmental impact of theatrical productions, including front office planning, day-to-day front-of-house operations and pre- and post-production activities. Last year, the BGA held a workshop on greener scenic design and construction. This year, the discussion turned to lighting.
Richard Cadena and I were asked to speak to a group of lighting designers, industry professionals and design students about how to make lighting for live entertainment greener. While Richard focused on data and how to evaluate lighting instruments against their green claims, my focus was day-to-day practices for lighting designers working on all levels of the entertainment business. Here’s what I talked about.
When it comes to sustainability, the lighting designer’s primary focus should be on energy used to accomplish the design. One could certainly evaluate a lighting design on everything from the embodied energy it took to build the fixtures down to what it takes to truck them to the venue, but at the end of the day, the lighting designer needs to focus on the needs of the production. They also need to challenge themselves to meet those needs using less energy. In the day-to-day, all else becomes “paralysis by analysis.”
Four Paths
There are four paths toward addressing energy consumption on stage as a lighting designer.
• Maintenance
• Light Source Selection
• Relative Brightness
• Spareness of Design
Maintenance — Good equipment maintenance would seem to be straightforward, yet basic best practices are often missed, especially in repertory and educational spaces. As designers, we should insist that all gear used to execute our designs is in full working order and well maintained. Solidly maintained gear performs at its most efficient — so let’s reiterate the basics.
First, clean everything. If you’re reading this magazine, you know how a dimming rack cools itself — with a fan pulling fresh air through the rack. You also know that process brings with it the collection of dust. The irony is that the captured dust builds up heat in the rack, meaning the system has to burn more energy to cool itself. In addition, this dust collection also diminishes output at the instrument downstream. If I have to push a channel to 90 percent to achieve the desired light level when I could have been at 80 percent, that’s a simple waste of energy.
At the other end of the chain, insist that all the instruments hung for the plot are clean. Traditional instruments cool themselves through convection, and that process also pulls dusty air through the fixture. Over time, that means dust will collect on the lens and reflector and, because of the heat of the light source, it will actually bake on a little bit. That dust reduces light output, forcing you to summon more energy to meet the desired light levels.
Lastly, make sure your ellipsoidal instruments are bench-focused properly. Often, if you aren’t getting a real hotspot, it’s because the bench focus of the fixture has been overlooked.
Also be sure to turn stuff off. I’ve been in far too many rehearsals that were carried out under stage lighting for no good reason. Not technical rehearsals, or put-ins for new cast members, I’m talking about early rehearsals. If your theater doesn’t have an alternate work light system, invest in one, and make it reliant on more sustainable sources like CFL or LED, and insist that it gets used. I’ve had directors say to me, “I hate working in this fluorescent light!” Too bad. Also, shut down things like dimming racks and consoles at the end of the night. Everything carries a phantom power load. It’s best if you can kill gear from breakers, pull boxes or power strips to reduce phantom power draw when the system is not in use.
Light Source Selection is perhaps the greatest opportunity to create a solid lighting design. By now, the benefits of LED sources are well known — including instant color changing and the ability to create surreal color washes of amazing brightness. But is RGBA LED ready to be your primary light source? Well, maybe. For me, any instrument choice is really finding the right solution for the right client and the right problem.
Wired’s Pop-Up Store
I recently designed a “Pop-Up Store” for Wired magazine in heart of Times Square, on 42nd Street and Broadway. The space was totally raw when we got to it, so we knew we’d be flying a brand new rig for this project. Time was limited, and with the expense of labor and the gear rental for a six-week run, we needed to work fast.
The primary design challenge to solve was the concept of “icy” blue. I know what that means to me…but what did it mean to the client? With no time to schedule a mockup, I decided it was best to work fast, and I opted for a Chroma-Q Color Force Compact RGBA as primary RGBA light source. Not only could I dial in any version of blue I wanted from the console, the instrument boasts a 92 CRI, a 14° optic and 1700 lumens.
Would I have chosen this source for a high-end fashion client? Probably not. However, Wired is a forward-looking brand focused on technology. The merchandise shown didn’t need to necessarily be in perfectly rendered light. It was a compromise that worked well for this client on this project.
In the end, we lit the 10,000-square-foot pop-up store using less than 3W per square foot. Not bad for a temporary installation.
Relative Brightness is a concept most of us are taught when we study lighting design in college. The concept is simple. For the most part, we start out in completely dark theaters. By adding light to any given subject, it is immediately the brightest thing in the audience’s visual field. We as designers dictate what feels brightest to the audience, and we can do that without a ton of lumens. Yet, somehow, there’s an arms race out there. I don’t know when it started, but just as every show seems to have gotten louder, it’s also gotten brighter. We need more lights to accomplish this, of course, which only increases the energy load. Remember, you control what your audience sees. The human eye is incredibly adaptable to new lighting conditions. Just create your show and don’t worry about the competition.
Spareness of Design is more a philosophy than a methodology. When I got out of college, I was so focused on the toys out there — the moving lights, LEDs, color scrollers — if it had a whiff of “fancy,” I liked it. That obsession with gear ended up pulling me away from the path toward great lighting design. As it turned out, I found out that the fewer toys I worked with, the better my design work became.
Constantly thinking about how I could use less gear got me thinking about how I could create effects that were right for the moments I was lighting. It’s about the fundamentals. The angle of incidence, the quality of the beam as it strikes it subject, the color it casts. Stacking up neat tricks isn’t the same as creating a beautiful lighting design. When you’re creating great design, you don’t need tons of toys.
After I gave my presentation, we had time for a vigorous and truly enjoyable Q+A session. The audience asked some really intelligent and challenging questions. One take-away was, in order to fully embrace sustainability, there needs to be some top-down direction. I couldn’t agree more.
Until producers and artistic directors care as much about sustainability as the folks in our audience, it will always be difficult to affect real change. Another point that was brought up was the discussion of legislation, and whether or not new laws were needed or necessary. The common consensus was that most municipalities don’t understand entertainment lighting well enough to craft legislation to govern and, ultimately, that was okay.
The night was a great success, and I thank the Broadway Green Alliance for giving me the opportunity to be a part of it. Making live entertainment along with the rest of our way of life truly sustainable is the challenge of the 21st century. Being surrounded by other professionals dedicated to making progress gave me tremendous hope for the future of our industry.
James Bedell, owner and principal of JPB Lighting, is a New York City-based lighting designer and
sustainability advocate.
