Behind every good lighting designer, there is a team of people responsible for making the vision turn into reality. When it comes to concert lighting and lighting for television, Allen Branton is one of the best in the business. In this month’s interview, we speak with Lighting Director/Gaffer David Oakes, who tells us about the folks who make up the “Branton Team” and how they work together to make his award-winning designs come to fruition.
FOH: Who is the team behind Allen Branton?
David Oakes: There are four of us who work with Allen on a regular basis: Tom Beck, Kevin Lawson, Felix Peralta and me. We assist him in put-ting his shows together. I think you have to have teamwork to get any of these shows completed. On most one-off productions, the time frame to set them up and get them functional is, in general, compressed. By having a team that you work with on a regular basis, each person knows what their task is. The lighting rig can be set up and functional in a manner that gives the time to program — and time for Allen to edit and work with the looks.
What is your role?
I am one of the lighting directors and gaffers. I do the preproduction work along with Kevin Lawson. I lay out the show, coordinate equipment with the vendor and develop an overall plan of attack for load-in. Once on site, my primary responsibility is to keep things moving in the right direction and to order additional equipment. Overall, I’m in charge of physical implementation of the lighting design.
What do the other members of the team do?
They are lighting directors. Tom Beck is in charge of spotlights and conventional focus. Kevin Lawson draws the lighting plots, He and I coordinate things during preproduction, and he also programs a portion of the lighting rig. Felix Peralta is the primary programmer; his responsibility is the music and/or the look. He builds the overall looks and has control of the scenic elements and effects. He and Kevin, with direction from Allen, work together to build the overall look.
For a show, you have two lighting programmers: one for close-up camera shots and one for the overall scene and special effects, right?
Correct — Felix Peralta and Kevin Lawson.
It sounds like all of you have roles during both preproduction and during production. Take us through the timeline, for example, of the show you are working on right now.
We’re working on Los Premios MTV, which is the Latin American version of the MTV Video Music Awards. We’ve been doing this for six years, since the inception of the show, and it’s in Mexico City this year.
The preproduction process begins with a site survey, which Allen or I will attend, where we meet with the producers and set designer. Usually, we get a set design within a couple of weeks from the set designer.
At that point, Allen has a general idea of what he wants to do in the room. He and Kevin will then come up with a design. Kevin then draws the lighting plot and sends it out to Allen and me. We generally have a conference call and go over what has been drawn and make some adjustments. Then, we have to send it out to bid to vendors, so we come up with an equipment list which can be bid on. This is generally a month-and-a-half to two months out. Additionally, we have a lighting coordinator, Liberty Bock, who plays an important role at this point.
Doesn’t she work with vendors to make sure you have everything you need?
Correct. She coordinates all of our lighting gear, does all the office work, gets budgets together and deals with the vendors as far as budgets go. Then we’re through the budget process, and we’ve received a second or third revision of the set design at this point, so we have to adjust the light-ing design to the revised set plans. About two weeks out, we start putting patches together and finalizing the workbook. About a week out, the gear gets prepped in the shop by the vendor. Generally, we like to send our own techs to help prep these shows.
Why do you do that?
When you have a shop that does touring or industrials as its primary work, they’re not necessarily used to the way we prep a television show. It preps differently from any other show, based on the fact that things often change on-site as you look at camera shots, so you have to have flexibil-ity. We will be adjusting things until we start loading out. If your backlight needs to move 10 feet to be in line with the camera, then you have to take the half-hour or 45 minutes to move it over so the shot looks right. Otherwise, you’re just not doing your job.
Once you get to the show, everything’s prepped and ready to go…
We’re here today and it’s a pre-rig day. We’ll go over the venue to make sure all of our plans have coalesced. We make sure that the team is think-ing on the same page as Allen. Then, tomorrow we will load-in and we’re into it.
How long do you have before the show takes place?
Each show varies, but generally most shows are based on a one-week schedule. There are three or four a year that are multiple weeks, and this par-ticular show is 12 days from load-in to load-out. Generally, rigging does a pre-rig in on the first day, the lighting loads in on Day Two and then the set loads-in. From there, you are continuing to refine…and you have about three or four days to do that. A seven-day schedule is pretty typical for the network specials that we do.
How useful is pre-viz for what you guys do? Is it realistic for television lighting?
We tried it a few times, but the problem is that sets change. Too much of it’s going to change for us to actually get something drawn in CAD in 3D and be able to use pre-viz to program it. Even more than that, the actual content of the show will change constantly. It’s all very fluid. That’s why a lot of the programming goes on during rehearsal.
Do you need that rehearsal time with the talent?
Yes. The rehearsal time is very important because it’s the only time you’re going to see all the elements (of the show) at once. You’re able to build your looks and adjust them — take lights and move them — to where it looks best on camera.
What’s the biggest difference between doing productions like U2’s Vertigo DVD versus the VMAs? How do you prepare for those differently?
They are different. We had about five days on Vertigo, and on those shows, you have to integrate with the band. There’s a lot of interaction with the band’s lighting team. On Vertigo, for example, there was a lot of integration that Allen had to do with Willie Williams and Bruce Ramus, their lighting director.
It was such a unique piece of art in its own right that our challenge was not to make it suitable for TV, rather to endeavor to capture it as faithfully as possible. With U2, this is very much about the close-ups and that is what we spent most of our energy on: moving followspots around, adding special accents to close-up backgrounds, etc. This sounds simple, but remember, you have four band members for whom you must maintain a killer close-up all the time.
So you’re trying to capture what they are already doing.
Yes. In some cases, U2 was unique in its camera readiness. However, on some of the other live concerts that we augment for television, you have more to do to make it photographable. A light that swings in from somewhere and parks on somebody’s face in green doesn’t affect the live con-cert-goer, but if you see that in close-up on television, it’s not going to look so good. So Allen goes in and cleans that up with the band’s lighting designer, his counterpart, for the camera shots. So that’s where a lot of the time on those types of shows is spent. Whereas, on a show like the VMAs, we have full control, and our programmers are programming the whole thing. It’s a different vibe, and it’s almost two different disciplines.
Not only are you lighting for television, you’re lighting for different types of television.
Correct. Like on comedy shows, you have five or six different looks, and you refine them to make them pristine. For example, take a Robin Wil-liams, or the Ellen Degeneres stand-up show, which we’ve worked on. You don’t have a lot of different looks on those. They’re about making it look pretty from every camera shot and refining the entire look. You change it up a bit, but there’s not a great variation on those shows.
What’s the best and worst part of your job?
I can’t speak for the entire team, but having some place to exercise my creativity is the best part…. But in reality, it’s a double-edged sword be-cause, while traveling is something I enjoy, being away from my family is the worst part. Another really enjoyable thing is having the family or girlfriend with you after a show, in some exotic location, when you can take a few days off.
