Lighting theories for the working designer
This New Year’s Eve I was in Rio with LD Alex Skowron lighting the Black Eyed Peas as part of a worldwide celebration Nokia was throwing in six cities. English LD Dave Hill designed the same lighting rig for six different festivals in separate time zones with different directors. It’s a TV thing. I imagine none of them looked close to the same, and that’s the beauty of this project. Everyone has their own style of lighting events.
Alex and I spent a week at Upstaging’s visualization suite outside of Chicago, preprogramming our looks from scratch using the same cues Alex executed all year long on tour with the Peas. Our theory about concert lighting is the same, and it’s not complex. We believe in achieving three objectives: first, always light the artist; second, illuminate your set; third, light some air.
Rule #1
Light the money. Certainly, everyone understands this, right? Nope. I constantly see shows where designers light some of the performers onstage while some are in the black. I cringe when I see two spotlights on one performer while the guy next to him has no light at all. This is an LD’s prerogative, mind you; it’s just not my style. You need to front light an act if you want them to be seen. In the case of the Peas, Alex has four 3K Gladiator spots for the four principal singers in the band. There are four backup musicians onstage. We have eight hard-edge and eight wash fixtures on a front truss to bathe them in bright washes or gobo patterns.
We like to keep the performers backlit properly as well. Alex will always designate some rear lights for the stationary musicians. Since the four singers rarely stop moving, there are four truss spots to cover their asses wherever they may roam. I hate seeing spotlight beams crisscrossing each other and messing up my beautiful looks onstage, so I often play what I call “zone defense.” I talk to the rear spot ops, and we designate some imaginary lines onstage. Whoever runs into your zone, you pick them up. If a performer runs far out of your zone, I will fade you and point out someone else for you to light closer to your zone. This is all fast and furious when rappers are running amok, but a good LD like Alex can pull it off and keep everyone backlit for the TV cameras.
Rule #2
Light the scenery. Face some facts here. Somebody has come up with an idea and talked somebody else into paying a lot of money to construct this so-called set. If you do not light it, no matter how gaudy or stupid it looks, you are not doing your job. And, of course, the scenic designer, set fabricator and event producer will make certain they never employ you again.
If you don’t light the surrounding elements, the performers will look stupid being the only thing lit onstage, and you will have the talking head effect. Imagine looking at a TV screen and seeing a newscaster’s head lit, but everything else in the room is dark. It looks like a stupid head talking in space. Your eye needs some kind of background against which to reference the performer — hence all the LED eye candy you see on every sports wrap or game show these days. For the Nokia show, we have a giant 3D ribbon that intertwines through the whole stage and rig, and Hill has hung 100 LED fixtures in all the trusses to throw color-mixing light at it. I am confident I will chase and highlight the hell out of this set piece simply because it’s there (and of course, I want Dave to get his gig back next year).
Rule #3
Light some air. Use your light beams to create some pretty geometric focuses, not to light anything in particular, just to see the beams. In the old days we used to call these “graphic” focuses. Take all your odd moving light fixtures and swing them to one position across stage. Grab the even fixtures and swing them the opposite way, creating a mirror image of the last group. Your stage now looks like a bunch of Xs. There’s your first graphic focus position. Take groups of lights to various fan focuses and make more positions. Floor lights are perfect for aerial focuses.
My only pet peeve is lighting designers who build graphic focuses that blind the audience constantly. Moving light through a crowd is often beautiful and dramatic, even more so when there are gobos breaking up the beam. But it’s tantamount to having a car approach you with high beams on. Unless you’re at a rave, nobody but the designer thinks it’s cool.
With many performances, you have no set to light — maybe a backdrop and a few risers, but little else. The light beams are your only set. Use your lights in combinations of focus positions to build layers. For instance, slash some upstage beams across the backdrop, and color them magenta. Use some other fixtures to build a straight wall of light pointing downstage, and color them blue. Now point some hard edge fixtures at band members, and color them pink. You now have a pretty blue scene with the performers standing out, and the slashes of light on the curtain add to the layers you have created.
The biggest problem when you are trying to build light layers is that you can end up with mud. That’s when you have too many light beams of different colors converging on a stage at once, creating a white-pinkish mush. It’s crap, and I see it all the time with young designers. To stop this is really simple. Look at your stage and start turning lights off one group at a time. The more you turn off, the sexier the scene looks. There is no rule that says all lights must be on all the time. But it works for some designers.
There are two separate paths a designer can choose. Some choose to leave the intensity of all of their lights on all the time. They rely on big fat grand looks. They also justify huge salaries and budgets that some designers feel they need for their craft. The opposite of this is something called negative space.
Many great designers excel at this, which is using minimal lighting onstage to create a few shafts of light that performers can walk in and out of. The shafts will stand out because they are not competing against any other light source and there is nothing else to catch your eye. Turn these lights off, and turn on a few selected fixtures for a second look. Going quickly between the two separate looks gives the illusion of movement. Front light the artist with some foot lights or sparse colored PARs on a front truss to complete a sexy simple look.
Lastly, the effect you can achieve in bumping from a big fat look to a negative space scene in zero time is quite dramatic. As Roy Bennett once told me, “I can have 200 moving lights going wild, but when I black them all out and just leave on that one blue Leko upstage, that’s when the crowd goes crazy.” He is so right.
E-mail Nook at nschoenfeld@plsn.com.
