Visualizing The Scenes

TOC - Lighting Key And Systems

It is now time to start thinking about what the actual individual pieces of your show are going to look like. You are finally starting to get into the meat of your design; this and turning your visualization into actual lighting units is what it's all about.

One thing: you've probably noticed that to this point I haven't even really talked about the lighting units you'll be using. You might think that it will be difficult to visualize how to light the show without knowing what the "tools of the trade" are, but in fact, that's not the case. Visualizing things is something we all do, every day, without the use of specifically theatrical equipment. By doing a design that is based on what you know lights can do, you are limiting your imagination right off the bat. Later, when you start to actually turn your ideas into lights, is when an intimate knowledge of the lighting units available to you and what you can do with them will become important.

That being said, there are a lot of "theatrical" effects which you won't see in real life, and quite a few precepts of design that will actually help you visualize your show. The effects I can't help you with; until you've seen them with your own eyes, you won't be able to visualize them. Just go to as many shows as possible, and when you see something cool, file it away in your memory bank, and then reuse it in a show of your own. As for the design precepts, I'll try to cover the ones I know about here.

Design Precepts

So how do you go about visualizing your show? Well, one place to start is the visual research you've already done. Continue to look through photo books, walk down the street and look at the lighting at various times of day, really start to examine how light functions in the environment around you. As a light designer, you need to start becoming intimately aware of how light fills space and affects mood. You can then apply your knowledge of "light" and how it functions to each scene in your show. When you do so, use the following lighting precepts to guide you:

• Controllable qualities of light
• Selective illumination
• Tension between show concept and scene concept
• Tension between realistic lighting and abstract lighting
• Tension between "designerish" lighting and practical considerations

Controllable qualities of light

If I were to ask you, "name the controllable qualities of light", you'd probably miss a couple. It's hard to think about all the things we can do to light to make it different, partly because it's so ephemeral. There are, of course, other ways of defining these controllable qualities, but here are my definitions (taken mostly from Gillette), which I'll list here and then discuss in detail: color, intensity, direction, distribution, change over time, coherence.

Color is pretty much what you'd expect, simply the color of the light. But there's a lot to that simple definition. First of all, if you aren't familiar with the physics definition of light, you should be. Any light we see has components of the various electromagnetic frequencies that make up visible light; our eyes, in various complex ways, combine those frequencies to produce the subjective impression of a single color. So mixing two deep colors, like say red and green, will give you a totally different color, yellow. But you can also get yellow by just having a pure yellow light. The point is that any particular color is actually a complex mixture of other colors, and different light sources that produce the same "color" may behave quite differently. An example: say you have a set that has yellow, green, and red elements. If you use pure red and green colors to light it, you will see all the colors in the set. If, on the other hand, you use a pure yellow light, you will only see the yellow, and the red and green will appear black (this assumes the dyes in the set are also fairly pure).

The point is that you will need to start paying attention to how color works in the world around you. Most light sources, including the sun, incandescent bulbs, and fluorescent lights, are approximately "black body" radiation sources, which means that they kick out pretty much all frequencies. In the theater, you place gels in front of these lights, which filter out various amounts of the visible frequencies (there's a graph of the transmission spectrum included with each gel). You probably won't actually use these transmission spectra, but knowing how gels work and what frequencies they pass can be very important. Also, alternate sources such as sodium lamps, neon lamps, and other specialty items may not follow the "black body" model, and may emit only narrow frequency bands. You need to be aware of the effect these various types of color will have on the stage, the actors, and the costumes.

In addition to all the above, you should also perhaps do some basic research on the emotional effects of various colors. Everyone knows that people "feel blue" or are "green with envy" or are "yellow-bellied cowards". How can you use these associations, and even more direct and powerful connotations of colors, in your shows? Color is a pretty direct emotional stimulus, and knowing how to manipulate the mood of your audience using it can be very valuable.

Intensity is also a pretty simple concept, and is just how bright the light is. There are a few technical terms for this, "footcandles", and "lumens", but you won't really need to deal with that too much. You should, however, be aware of the fundamental rules of illumination like the inverse-squared law. You should also be aware that by their very nature putting colored gel in front of a lighting unit will significantly dim the light. Deep blues tend to have transmission percentages in the 3% range, which is pretty dark. So you'll need to adjust for that. There are a number of theories about what "works" in terms of a minimum and maximum comfortable intensity, and you do need to make sure you have enough lights set up to provide at least the minimum, but in my experience few people take the time to actually calculate the amout of light you'll get out of your lighting units. For the most part, the lighting units used in theater, if set up according to the precepts contained in this document, will provide ample illumination.

One fundamental concept about intensity is that it's a relative thing. The absolute measurements only tell you so much. Assuming that the light isn't too dim or too bright for the eye to adjust to, be aware that you can "trick" the audience into thinking that a fairly dim scene is bright (and vice versa) by simply preceding the dim scene with an even dimmer one. The audience's eyes will adjust to the dimmer scene, and by the time the next (dim) scene comes along, it will seem comparatively bright. Remember, it takes the eye as much as ten minutes to fully adjust to a new light intensity.

Direction seems pretty simple, but it's not. It seems that humans have a hard-coded reaction to a lot of the directional effects of light. I'm sure you've all seen the "flashlight under the chin" thing that people do, and they actually do look scary when they do that. By lighting natural things, particularly people, in unnatural ways, you can really affect how people percieve the show.

Of course, in most cases, you won't be using just a single angle of lighting. Light Designers use the direction of their lights to achieve several things, including selective illumination (e.g. pick a direction that will hit one thing, but not another, remembering that the light will spill beyond the object it lights), modeling (by highlighting the edges of the object with light from above or the side, it tends to emphasize the shape of the object), and fill lighting (by lighting directly from the front, one can fill in the crannies in the object, say a face, and make it more visible, but also flatter). When you think about direction, remember to think about what happens to the light after it hits the object it is intended to light. If you have an actor standing in a spotlight, will the rest of the light spill offstage? Onto other actors upstage? Into the audience? The light may also bounce, and if you are lighting from the back of the stage, you will need to pay particular attention to ensuring that the light itself or its bounce will not blind the audience (unless that's what you want to do!).

Distribution, in this case, refers to the area of the stage that the light covers. You may light only a specific section of the stage, or the whole thing; each will have its affect on the audience's perception. In addition, there is the internal distribution of a single lighting unit, e.g. where the light that comes out of it goes. On some types of lights, you can actually use gobos to create patterns of light that are cast on the stage; pretty much any patterns you want are available. By modifying the distribution from a single unit, or set of units, you can create subtle pattern effects that give "texture" to a scene, or provide imagery or overlapping colors.

When asked about the controllable qualities of light, most people miss that light changes over time. When you think about a particular scene in a play, you probably think about the lights being static and the actors moving. But the opposite can happen as well; the actor can be frozen and the lights can tell the story. It's amazing how much the difference is between a few seconds here and there in your timing. For example, imagine a tense scene on the stage. How does it feel if you quickly black out, almost cutting off the last line of dialog, versus holding the light cue almost interminably after the last line is said, and then slowly fading out? The difference can be enormous, and in my opinion is one of the more important aspects of design. I tend to "feel" the timing just by listening to the scene as it plays out, but on occasion one can play tricks to achieve certain effects. Changes can of course be simple blackouts and the timing of cues, but can also refer to complex multiple fades, long fades that last entire scenes, or even setting lights to music.

And the last controllable quantity of light, which requires a bit of explanation, is coherence. Sort of akin to parallelism, a coherent beam of light's rays never cross each other. This only happens with a point source, which means that there's a single point from which all the light rays radiate. In most theatrical units, the bulb is essentially a point source (close enough, anyway), but the various reflector and lens arrangements affect the coherence of the eventual beam. A fluorescent tube, on the other hand, is pretty non-coherent; you have a four foot radiating source — lots of the rays will cross.

So what's the effect of a coherent beam? Coherent beams cast shadows. Any light will cast a shadow of course, if you get the shading object close enough to the surface, but coherent beams make sharper, cleaner shadows. So a typical theatrical ellipsoidal, which spits out a pretty coherent beam, will cast a shadow of an actor on the floor, whereas if you lit the same actor (from fairly close up) with a fluorescent, you wouldn't get a shadow.

Coherence comes into play, therefore, if you want to cast patterns on the floor, or you want to carefully control where light goes by masking it off in various ways. The coherence of the light source will also affect the subjective impression of the light, how much it "bounces" off the floor, how "soft" or "hard" it is. All of this will become important when you get to selecting instruments for your show.

Selective Illumination

One of the fundamental concepts you'll have to keep in mind while designing your lighting is that of selective illumination. Unlike everyday life, the stage is a very unnatural world in which words, images, sounds take on extra meaning. At the same time, there are all sorts of distractions; other audience members, random pieces of scenery, backdrops, curtains and the like, all of which tend to pull focus away from the significant action onstage. The problem is that as a designer, you want the audience to be looking in the right place at the right time, and not be distracted by seeing some stage hand moving something backstage, or by some other actor scratching her nose. One way to do this is through selective illumination.

The human eye is naturally drawn toward the brightest object in the field of vision, so clearly what you want to do is make sure that the most significant thing going on onstage is brighter than anything else in the audience's vision. This can be subtle, like a slow 30s fade that will slowly draw the audience's attention from one area of action to one that is going on in a different place, to dramatic sudden changes that quickly bounce up a new scene and black out an old one. The intensity difference can be very minimal; adding 5% or so to the lights in a particular area will draw focus there naturally.

The idea here is to allow the audience to focus on what they need to see in order to understand the play. In general, anything that is in motion will also be a visual attractor, so you especially want to deemphasize any actor or set movements. On the other hand, you don't want to be too blatant about your lighting shifts and focusing the light in one particular area. This can in itself become tiring and distracting to the audience, if done too much. And if you are trying to light a realistic daytime scene, you probably don't want a single spot highlighting the speaking actor, as that will confuse the audience's perception of what is supposed to be going on. So you should probably design your play as usual, but just keep the concept of selective illumination in the back of your mind, and look for places where the audience might get distracted and where you need to do something to fix that.

Tension Between Show Concept And Scene Concept

As you start to work your way through the script, imagining the various scenes in your head, you will have to keep two potentially conflicting "visions" in your head. Each scene of course will spark visual ideas, but at the same time much of the early work you did in discussion with the other designers was to nail down an overall show concept. You therefore need to reconcile the lighting the individual scene calls for and the lighting the overall show concept calls for.

I usually go about this in a couple ways. First of all, I am generally pretty aware of the show concept by the time I start breaking down scenes, and this means that I have some visual images based on the show concept in my head, although they might not be based on actual scenes or ever actually appear in the show. I might have some of my visual research on hand while I work on the script, to help me remind myself of what I was looking for.

Having a good idea of the overall concept will allow me to work on each scene within that framework. Now, as I've said before, one must be careful not to "force" the show concept onto the script, so once I have a general idea of the show concept, I work on the scenes and sort of ignore that show concept for a while, although of course it's there in the back of my mind. But it serves to provide ideas, rather than limiting my ideas, at this stage.

Once the scene work is done, I will revisit the script and my visual notes, and see how things work with the show concept. In most cases, things will work fine; either the ideas I had for the scene had their genesis in the show concept, or the scene called for something that the show concept didn't provide and there is no other way around that. Occasionally, I will adjust a few things here and there to make things fit better (and that goes both ways, incidentally; both the scene work and the show concept might change).

It might also be a good idea to bring up any significant questions about the scenes and how you are planning to light them that arose during your visualization process in your production meetings. I find that often I get some idea for a scene, develop it, think it's going really well, only to discover that the director has some wacky idea that he or she just didn't get around to mentioning to me yet. That's OK, the director is of course entitled to suggest scenic ideas, and I usually go along with them unless I think they really won't work or I have a much better idea.

Tension Between Realistic Lighting And Abstract Lighting

There's another fundamental idea that should guide your light designs, and that is the degree of abstractness or realism in your design. Clearly, there are some things that ordinarily can't be done onstage, like say create the effect of truly realistic sunlight, and there are some "stage" effects that you rarely will see outside the theater. But in general for many shows you should be striving to create effects that "look" fairly realistic, if only because this is what the audience will most readily grasp. On the other hand, some shows really call for purely abstract lighting, where you are trying to manipulate the audience in a more fundamental emotional way, and realistic lighting will get in the way.

Of course, no lighting on stage will ever be truly realistic, if only because you need to consider the issue of "selective illumination" described above. The formulaic lighting methods like the McCandless method are designed to look fairly realistic, while at the same time allowing the principles laid out here to be applied. So as you do your design, you should think about the degree of realism you want in your scenes, and the effects that breaking that convention will have on the audience's perception of the show. Dance, for instance, in general calls for a slightly more dramatic sidelight which highlights the figure rather than the facial features. A modern dance show might be even more abstract, and use colors and lighting angles to create mood and thought. The varieties are endless, and you will need to explore all your options.

Tension Between "Designerish" Lighting And Practical Considerations

The last thing you should keep in mind as you design, and particularly when you get to writing cues, is the sort of "practical aspect" of theater. Quite often, I have some terribly dramatic lighting effect worked out, that uses an abstract pattern or some funky color, and then the director says "I can't see the actors' faces, can we bring up the light a bit?" So I bring up the facelight, and my effect is much less beautiful. Such is life: of course the fundamentally most important thing to be doing is to allow the audience to experience the show (and therefore, the action) without distraction. Too little light is a distraction, as is too much or in the wrong place. This ties back in with selective illumination.

To put it bluntly, you should never do anything with your lights that calls attention to itself, unless it adds value to the audience's understanding of the show. Beauty is not a good enough reason, nor is the coolness factor. By calling attention to the lighting (maybe you bring up a cool gobo, or shift colors, or start pulsating some lights), you might be pulling focus from the actors, and if they're saying or doing anything of significance, you might cause an audience member to miss an important line. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, and in fact the degree to which you can do "lighting effects" is dependent on many factors, including the quality of the script, the quality of the actors, how much time the director wants to put between scenes or lines, how much you can use lighting separate from the action to reinforce themes in the show, and others. If you have special effects or lighting changes you want to make, or special cues you want to build, discuss their appropriateness with the director. He or she may need to build the scene around the lighting sometimes; this might be appropriate under special circumstances, and might make a very coherent and interesting production. But always have a backup plan, because sometimes you will discover that when you actually see the effect, with actors, set, costumes, etc, it looks kinda dumb, and you need to cut it. Or the director might simply decide it's not working, and ask you to cut it. Either way, you should be aware of the implications of the more dramatic and noticeable effects you design.

TOC - Lighting Key And Systems