Tips and Advice for the Lighting Designer

These are some tips for someone who is doing the job of Lighting Designer. For what the LD does see our position description.

These are a few handy hints mainly discoverd by making mistakes or fortuitous accident

• Be careful using 2kW lanterns for general lights. The Dancehouse have some very nice ADB 2kW Fresnels but they're a lot brighter than the Sil Turbos FOH so you can easily make the important DS strip look really dim by making the mid stage too bright.
• Profiles can be used in stage to give a remarkably even wash (given they're profiles). Cross them from the off stage edges across the stage focused wide and fairly soft. Use with a little fill light of a different colour from the font and they provide realy good shape and highlights.
• The addition of a mid or strong frost to a Par 64 can make it into a fairly nice open wash light to flood in a bit of colour. Very useful if PARs are all you've got left after doing a general cover with Fresnels. Without the frost they tend to have a fairly ugly oval hot-spot and wide spill which isn't always what you want.
• Don't be (too) afraid of unsymterical rigs and plotting. Using contrasting colours from different directions or on different parts of the stage gives a much more interesting and powerful design. It's useful to have different colours on different channels but if you're short it's by no means essential.
• If you have to put multiple lanterns on a channel but know you want them at different brightnesses you can always use neutral density filter to dim one of them.
• Remember that if you dim a tungsten lantern a lot you get a very orange light. If you know you need the lantern dim, partiacularly in a cool colour, consider using a lower wattage lantern or neutral density filter.
• Bear in mind the transmittance of gels you're selecting. Congo blue is a fantastic colour but you need a huge lantern if you want to see any light on stage. If you've got a limited number of lanterns select a gel with a little more transmittance or if you want a particular gel compensate by using more and bigger lanterns.
• Lavender can be used as a "general" colour. Either warm it with straw or cool it with steel. Good when limited number of lanterns available for a wash. Works well. Idea from Si to check exact lavender. Mark D thinks it's Lee 003 - Lavender tint.
• Order Gels by number -- even saying I want Lavender and meaning Lee's gel called lavendar means at times you get someone else's idea of lavender i.e. purple which doesn't work and isn't usable. Insist on a particular colour, or have it matched from a swatch/check if substituted.
• Gobo projection is a useful tool and it's back in fashion. It's great for adding texture and something a bit different to your design however there's a couple of things to remember
  • Be careful with beam angle, as a rule, it won't be nearly as wide as you expect it to be, take the time to do the maths and work out what coverage you can get from where.
  • Gobos make the lantern really dim and if you gel it even more so. Use the biggest lights you can get/afford/have space for. Even then, don't expect it to cut through your wash.
  • Movers are a nice tool for gobo projection but many aren't very bright either, not until you get up to 500s and 2000s.

• Always check where the action is taking place (don't always believe what the director says)
• Remember to light people not where they stand -- focus on a person, since to light their head require focusing further back!

• Prepare the cues in the lib before the plot session, so its quick to flick through and set/save the states.
• Its a gamble between plotting everything all at once or doing a rough plot and refining it. Plotting everything is usually slightly quicker overall, but if you don't finish it all (which in MUGSS shows is common) then you've got a show with black states!
• If its looking unlikely you'll complete all states, giving up on plotting and moving to submasters is good for flying. Being able to cover all areas should be a priority then colours then specials.
• Assuming your lighting desk lets you record the live state to cues preparing subs for different washes, areas and specials first can greatly increase your plotting speed. Remember on Strand desks you can add and subtract subs using SUB n @ WHEEL *;
• When programming for moving lights remember to pay attention to what they're doing when you're not using them as well as when you are especially if your desk doesn't have auto-move-in-dark.
  • Lights moving around are noisy and distracting so keep them in a sensible place when you're not using them. Avoid having them whizz back to 0 0 home when they're not in use.
  • Make sure the lights are in the right place and have the right colour and gobo for the cues before and after the ones they're used in. Otherwise you get a great disco effect as they whizz into place and all the wheels spin when the cue comes up.
  • On Strand 530/550 desks you can use (chan/chans) @ CUE x {ATTS ONLY} and on 520s (chan/chans) @ CUE x [REC MODE] {ATTS ONLY} to copy the attributes but not intensities from the cue specified. -- Rob Halliday - Blue Room Technical Forum
  • If you're programming a moving chase bear in mind the speed of the lanterns and the distance between steps. If you're executing steps at a constant rate and some of your positions are much closer together than others you'll either have the lantern hanging around stationary at near together points or it will never get to the far points before starting to move on to the next.