What’s your favorite color? This is a question I ask my 3-year-old occasionally. He answers with “green” most times. Then he asks me back the same question. “That would be Lee 119,” comes the reply. That’s because I’ve had the various numbers of gel colors brainwashed into my head. All good lighting guys memorize these numbers over time, and if you don’t know what Lee 119 means, you may be new to lighting.
Colored Gels
Rosco and Lee are two predominant manufacturers of colored gels in America. I’ve never counted up how many colors of gel they make, but it’s probably close to a thousand. They both sell the same colored gels. Of course since lighting designers are such art geeks, many need a minimum of 10 shades of yellow. Sure, there is a difference between a straw color and canary yellow, but do we really need 10 types of yellow? I don’t, but I know people who do. Great American Market (GAM) makes gel that’s different than the rest. They make colors that the two big guys don’t list in their repertoire, such as Pistachio and Cherry, which are now on my list of favorite colors. These gels seemed to be a little tricky on the eye. If I looked directly at the source of light used to shine beams through the gel, I see one color. But if I looked at the object that was lit, I saw a different shade of it.
Colored Dichroic Glass
I have been watching the gradual demise of gel in our industry. The first thing to replace it was colored dichroic glass. They make different-sized cuts of glass to fit in various lighting fixtures — predominantly PAR 64s, lekos, Fresnels and all moving lights. These are quite useful, as they don’t fade much over time. But at the same time, they are heavy, expensive, and they break. Nobody ever kicked over a fixture and broke $100 worth of gel. Dichroic glass filters are extremely necessary in architectural lighting. High-powered xenon bulbs will fade the color in a gel quickly. The manpower cost of changing these gels daily (or hourly) would far surpass the cost of the hard dichroic filters. The advent of LED fixtures has made gel disappear from high-dollar productions as well.
Ever notice how certain buildings can change color to match significant dates on the calendar? Electricians use various color filters to turn buildings red and green for Christmas, blue for autism awareness, etc. But how do they do it? Various ways. The most widely-photographed building in the world is the Empire State Building in New York City. For a fee, they will change the color of their building to match your occasion. Mind you, they actually list the available colors on their website, so if you’re thinking pistachio, get lost. But it’s neat how they light it. The higher floors of the skyscraper are illuminated by three rows of fluorescent lights. The tubes get covered by gel for special occasions. But the building requires focusable xenon bulb fixtures to illuminate the very top, as the tower builds to a peak. These fixtures need colored dichroic glass instead of gel.
LED’s Impact
The advent of LED fixtures has been a savior in our profession, as rental companies are embracing the idea of not having to buy expendables as often. An expendable is anything in our business that gets used up or destroyed over time.
Light bulbs and gel are expensive. I personally hate most LED fixtures simply because I despise the sight of little red, green and blue bulbs combined to splash a color. I look at them as more eye candy than fixtures designed to actually shine light on a subject. Thank God for the evolution of tri-colored LEDs. Now I have one source of light that shines a nice, seamless color for an output. I’m not a big fan of the MAC 301 for reasons stated above. But the MAC 401 is just one of the best LED fixtures ever invented. But like most LED fixtures, it cannot achieve a white color through just RGB mixing. The VLX by Vari*Lite has solved that problem and has amazing colors. But you pay the price another way. This fixture has perhaps the best LED color range, but the output sheds such a halation (unwanted omni-directional side light) that I must be careful when spec’ing the fixture on projects. I recently used 20 of these fixtures from the air to back light a choir that stood in front of a white projection screen. The talent was beautifully lit. Unfortunately, the halation from those same lights turns my white screen to the same color inadvertently when the projectors were doused.
Color-Mixing Systems
Moving lights tend to use arc bulbs and dichroic color filters. So manufacturers of various moving lights have different ways to build their unique color systems. Some fixtures are good. Some are simply pathetic in the way they mix color. Some moving lights can mix 100 different colors; some can’t even mix a true red. The problem with mixing different colored glass filters together to make certain colors is that they rarely get a flat field of light out of the fixture. In other words, to come up with the color pink, most fixtures will simply slide the magenta dichroic glass halfway into the path of a white light. Hence we are mixing magenta and white to get pink. But it’s not real pink. In fact, it is a cheap, crappy pink. Because of this, many color mixing moving lights also have a wheel with several fully colored glass filters that will show a perfectly flat field of color. No magenta, no white, just pink. The other problem with using multiple colored dichroic filters to mix colors is that this cuts down on the actual amount of lumens coming out of the fixture.
So far, I would say that Morpheus Lights has the best color-mixing system, and it was designed 25 years ago! Their lights had the same three-colored wheels used today by all manufacturers, but each glass wheel had actual gradually smaller sized holes etched in them. So when the color wheel was at one end, there were big air holes so a small pink hue of color was noticeable. Halfway through the wheel, the holes gradually got smaller, so the light beam became a rose color tint. Finally, at the end of the wheel, there were no air holes, just a solid sheet of magenta glass in front of the beam. To this day, I am amazed that no other manufacturer has figured out this concept.
A good LD knows which lights to spec on a show, depending on what colors they can achieve. Vari*Lite 3000 series fixtures are famous for not being able to mix the deep Congo blue that most shows utilize. Even the ultraviolet dichroic glass in their color wheel pales in comparison to most other manufacturers. They tend to not color mix yellow well either. If you require those colors, I suggest you try a Martin or Robe fixture. But if you are a big fan of the prettiest gold color on the planet — or Lee 119 — these fixtures are a must-have on your show. And, BTW, Lee 119 is a deep rich midnight blue, so I use Vari*Lites constantly.
