pulseHEAD.com
SIGN IN REGISTER SEARCH ABOUT CONTACT
Lighting Design
Support pulseHEAD.com, and get some free money too. (THIS SPACE AVAILABLE)ESSAY SUBMITTED BY hamilton AT 2008.11.17 05:14 AM | VIEWED 111 TIMES
CONTENT
If there is one thing that I am told more than anything else, it?s that I have a strange career. I am a lighting designer. Theatre, concert, corporate, you name it, I?ll point a bulb at it.
A lot of people are just plain confused about the concept. Many think it must be similar to graphic designer, or interior designer. Some think I?m a cameraman. I?ve been asked if I made the new track light at IKEA before. But lighting design is far from any of these things.
Simply put, it is the lighting designers job to determine the position, focus, colour and number of lighting instruments during any given event. But that?s a damned boring explanation. What a lighting designer does is create everything possible with lighting fixtures. A blue backlight can turn day into night onstage. A sharp line can create imaginary walls. Anything can be suggested with light.
The lighting designer has to be an artist, a psychologist, a technician and an assistant. At the end of the day, we enhance somebody else?s vision. We use the tools at our disposal to reveal, to hide, to change, and to fundamentally change the way that people - literally - look at things. We use technology to create art to enhance art.
Imagine life without interesting lighting. The dead, almost eternal twilight of Waiting For Godot. The inhuman silhoutte of the killer in Psycho. The visceral glow of an entire city burning in Gone With The Wind. All things that are made legendary by their use (and lack of use) of light.
Even in everyday life, the effects of light are obvious when you think about them. Flourescent light bulbs are easily the most obvious example. Picture the room you are sitting in bathed in the warm orange glow of a tungsten light bulb. Now picture it in a harsh, blinding white. They almost become different places.
But what do we use to re-create these natural occurences?First we must consider what light consists of, and how we view it.
The most obvious quality of light is it?s colour. Everybody knows that different colours have different psychological associations. Red is angry and passionate, blue is peaceful, yellow is energetic, and for some reason, nobody likes green. A lighting designer has to use these colours as compliment to the illumination, as a subtle hint of what is going on.
The next thing is direction. If our scene is supposed to be outside on an overcast day, there are not going to be any shadows. If we?re playing poker on a smoky table lit by a single gas lamp, we are going to see a ton of shadows. A bad feeling of direction will instantly ruin the believability of any lighting moment.
Next is intensity. It is almost blinding in the desert at noon, and nigh on pitch black at night in the woods. If I turn on my lamp in a dark room, parts of the room will be much brighter than others. People?s psychological reactions are intrinsically tied to intensity. Brightness is invigorating and safe. Darkness is warm, cozy, and frightening. If the brightness is off, we are again completely removed from the reality we?ve created.
Finally, there?s texture. In our lives, light almost comes at us from multiple sources, at different intensities. These create a quality that is difficult to define, but is incredibly important. When you walk through a forest during the day, the texture of the light you see is patchy, dark in some places, bright in others. Obviously much different than the look of something under a flat flourescent light.
Now that we?ve looked at what light consists of, let?s look at how we can recreate it.
The first, obviously, is the source of the light. Lighting fixtures are created specifically for the entertainment industry, and differ greatly from anything found at home. The average fixture weighs in at 1000 watts, ten to twenty pounds of solid metal, and retails between one hundred to thousands of dollars. They come in all different shapes and sizes, for all types of different uses. There is the ellipsoidal, with a complex optical lens system, designed to give a hard edged circular beam that can be shaped with the use of shutters. A pattern can also be put into an ellipsoidal, creating texture. Then there is the par can, which you have undoubtedly seen at a concert at some point in your life. Cheap and nigh on unbreakable, these fixtures are literally automobile headlights in a circular can. Their beam can not be adjusted in any way, but they are the workhorses of the industry. There are also fresnels, follow spots, strips lights, scoops, birdies, banks, and a hundred more other things. The only thing in common in some cases is the presence of a bulb.
Next, we can change the character of the light. Using something called gel, which is essentially a translucent piece of coloured plastic, we can change the colour of the light. Simply put it in front of the source, and that white light is now a deep blue, a light green, or a colder shade of white. The only limit to the colours that can be made is literally one?s imagination. As mentioned above, we can use shutters and patterns to further control the shape of the beam. Most lamps are also on dimmer systems, allowing them to fade up, fade out, and be on at any brightness necessary.
These are controlled by specialized interfaces, called lighting consoles. There are only about five major manufacturers of these consoles, and none of them create more than three thousand each year. Most are European. They can retail between two hundred dollars and fifty thousand, depending on their size, complexity, and build quality. From these consoles, we can control almost any attribute of a lamp.
And with recent technological breakthroughs, we have gotten into some pretty incredible things. Moving lights are made now, so that from a console, one can change the lamps direction, colour, pattern, shutters, brightness and many other features. The breadth of control and possibilities available today is downright staggering. Of course, these lamps aren?t cheap. The absolute most high end models, which can include extras like built in video projectors, can go for as much as one hundred thousand dollars.
At the end of the day though, this technology means nothing if it is not used properly. A good designer knows how to enhance a scene or moment with the smallest of highlights. A good designer knows how to simulate a situation using nothing but colour and position. A good designer can make a characterless object or situation heartbreaking or exhilarating. A great designer, however, can do all of these things, and never be noticed by the audience. Few people stop to consider how it happens. A family member once told me that she thought the lights ?kind of just happened.? And that?s a good thing.
Anyways, that?s my two cents on my job. It?s something I love dearly, and consider myself lucky to work in. Everytime I hear the slight intake of breath coming simultaneously from an audience when a scene changes perfectly, or the colours match just right, I?m reminded why I love what I do. This is an art form, it?s a science, and it?s the job of creating magic every night.
If you want to know more about design, look up Stanley McCandless online, and go from there. There is no shortage of interesting opinion and theory available.
And to make this post half-interesting, reply back with a description of what you do, and why.
RATING: 4
COMMENTS