Saturday Feb. 9th.
Today I was able to go to the middleschool bright and early with our director to set up lights for our upcoming musical.
A constant challenge I face and many lighting designers may face is lighting of the faces. As I have discussed previously, I prefer to classify three different types of lighting when talking about stage lighting.
Background Lighting - This gives us a feel of where we are in the musical, either the physical setting or the mood and intensity of the scene.
Facial Mood Lighting - Color light that we will put on the face of the actors to give off a mood or impression.
General Facial Lighting - This provides usually a white light on the face and body of the actors to make them more natural and make it so they do not just blend in with the background.
Today, Steve and I focussed on General Facial Lighting, which is very important to a middle school production as a common complaint received is not enough light on the actors’ faces
As Shown Above, We rented this year four new lighting fixtures to hang on one of the bars shown above. Although I am the lighting designer, I also hang fixtures, fix fixtures, oversee audio plots and some stage features, all of which should be done by individuals in a large scale theatre.
Also, due to our theatre doubling as a cafferia, it is not the best for acoustics and lighting. If you take a look at the picture on the right, you will see that we have no catwalk to hang lights from, so we need a ladder every time. If we look at a picture below which was taken at Le Moyne College, with a well known theatre, we can see there is a whole system of catwalks that make lighting design very creative. The catwalk here is right above the stage providing easy access and lighting.
So, how do we solve our issue of not having an easily customizable lighting system? Since we are not a full-time theatre, we will rent lights depending on our needs. We already have enough background lights coming from overhead Stage(Strip) Lights and LED’s. We have Facial Mood lighting coming from Spotlights, Moving lights overhead, and LED’s. But we only have General Facial lighting coming from our Lights on the tech deck (Which are a far away) and four fresnels. So to provide of General Facial Light, we will rent and install the four lights pictures above.
With more time and ladders invested into installing our lighting system, we will have a lighting grid as effective as Le Moyne’s, only with more prep work required.
After today begins the creativity, I had the privilege of seeing their production run through once today, and can now begin my creative lighting throughout the week, now that we have all lighting covered.