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I’m always asked how I get lighting design gigs. Half the time they are return gigs, meaning it’s the same trade show or band that goes on tour every year. Forty percent of the time I am called by production people or other designer friends to cover a gig. The other 10% are people calling because they’ve seen one of my shows and want to hire me based on what they’ve seen. You never know who’s in the crowd watching your work.
I constantly get calls from old friends who are passing through Chicago. They ask me to come down and say hi. I like to visit and I get to see different productions. Half the time I don’t know the LD and vice versa. But I’ll go and introduce myself. If the show’s well lit, I’ll make it a point to remember who lit it. If not, I forget who the LD was by the next day. People come up to my console and introduce themselves all the time when I’m running a show. I like meeting them. My point is that you never know who’s in the audience at any show. A project manager may walk past your beautifully lit booth at a trade show and ask if you can help him with his next project. I’ve had guitar players call their managers and tell them to hire me, not by name, but as that guy who lit this certain band he saw last month.
I was having a beer with fellow designer Joe Paradise last week at Barney’s in Hollywood. We started talking about a particular artist we would both like to light, because— quite frankly—their last designer did not do a good job. This designer is a nice guy who gets along with everyone, and that’s why the production manager hired him. As I’ve noted before, people in our biz get more gigs based on their personalities as opposed to their talent. I asked Joe why he thought this designer wasn’t very good. He said it all in one phrase: “He’s lazy.”
I pondered this for a few seconds before agreeing with him. When I saw this guy’s light show last year I noticed that he had about 100 moving lights and only one focus position for all of them. He simply changed color on every song. And all the colors were pastels. He would go from lavender/ pink looks on one song to blue-green/ Congo blue on the next. When the management asked him to make his show look more rock ‘n’ roll, he added eight bars of ACL PARs in wide focused fans. With all the moving lights he had he could have easily built a few more focus positions, added some primary colors to his looks and have a rock show. This LD was not asked back.
A few years ago I was brought in to re-program a console for a tour that had been out the year before. The artist was adding a few new songs, but basically playing the same 20 hits he had been playing for years. So we were going to use last year’s show disks and spice them up. The show was in the round with well over 100 moving lights. When I went to focus for the fi rst time, I learned that there were only fi ve focus positions for all the lights. It took me all of 15 minutes to refocus. I asked the designer if this was correct and she informed me that this was all she ever needed.
As we were programming the new songs I showed her some cool stuff we could do. She pondered it for less than a second and instructed me to just take one of our existing songs and change the color. As a programmer you should never offer advice unless it is requested, so I just did as I was told. Now I had another song that looked just like all the others. She didn’t want to spend more than half an hour touching up her focus positions each day, so the show looked about half as good as it could have been. The designer was lazy. Who notices these things? Other lighting designers and production managers do.
About five years ago my friend George asked me to run a typical business meeting/ ballroom show. There wasn’t a big budget and I was limited to about six Cyberlights for movement and an assortment of conventional fi xtures. When I got to the gig I asked the producer what she wanted to see and she told me to just give her one red, one blue and one amber look, and each time a different speaker came to the stage, swap scenes between the three looks. I did so and didn’t think anything of it. Everything was fi ne until the next time I ran into George.
George is one of those people who speaks his mind. And he told me point blank that his client was disappointed that there wasn’t a lot more variety in my lighting looks. I hung my head in shame. He was absolutely right; I had been incredibly lazy as a programmer. Plus, this was after he had spoken so highly of my skills beforehand. It took me about a year before George let me run another corporate show for him. By this time I had a new attitude about doing these small shows. Plus, I adhered to my own advice that I try and tell others: Never bring up the same look twice.
Six moving lights may not be many, but if they are hard edge fi xtures, you can get a hundred different looks. Here are a few clues about how you can make six lights do a lot of work. You just can’t be lazy.
On all these ballroom jobs, there is some sort of scenery to light. Whether it’s chiffon columns or fancy drapes, there is always something on which you can change the color and texture. Use your moving lights to light the scenery. Use some Fresnels and Lekos to light people and product displays. I would generally place these fi xtures on a front truss because that is the best vantage point for the lights to illuminate the scenery without any obstacles in the sight lines. Plus you can always turn these fi xtures around to ballyhoo the audience.
Any moving light will have at least seven colors. And if there is no color mixing, chances are it can do split colors. This gives you about 14 colors to light the scenery. You can mix and match these colors in pairs to create about 30 color combos.
Now add your textures—gobos or prism effects. If you have seven different gobos, you actually have 21 different looks right there. Each gobo will look different depending on whether you rotate it or leave it static. They will also look different if you throw the light beam out of focus so that it just looks like ruffl es or waves. Adding a prism on top of a gobo is a great way to diffuse the beam as well as widen it to cover more of the scenery.
The important part of being a lighting designer is to use your imagination while fi guring out the best way to utilize the tools you have to work with. Complaining that you don’t have the right lights simply makes you look weak and wastes what programming time you will need to come up with many different looks . . . if you’re not lazy.
E-mail Nook at nschoenfeld@plsn.com.
