LIGHTING THE SCHOOL SHOW

This Guide has ten pages.

(Artistic)

The most commonly seen lighting mistake in both school and amateur theatre is the shadow going in different directions as an actor walks across (or worse, up and down) the stage.

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So, first you illuminate: you make sure that the actors can be seen, but in such a way that shadows (if there are any) fall consistently. But if you just blast light at them from in front of the stage (Front of House or FoH), you will make their faces look flat and the features indistinguishable. You need to provide some modelling.

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Now let's think about mood. You're doing Joseph and the Amazing... etc. and you come to the scene where Joseph is in prison. You can't build a prison - there's no time to change the set in this show - but you want to suggest a gloomy, cold, dank prison cell. How do you do it? With lighting, of course!

First bring in one narrow beam spotlight from directly over Joseph: you'll see that you have sharp-edged pool of light on the stage and there are long shadows being cast straight down Joseph's face. Now you bring in some other wider beamed spotlights, again from overhead, around this pool, but they are slightly out of focus (and so soft-edged) and much dimmer, probably a third of the brightness of the first or even less (you'll need to experiment to get the best effect). Now you have Joseph on a dark stage in a pool of light that is bright in the centre but falling rapidly off to a very dim soft-edged pool around him. He looks very haggard because of the black, straight-down shadows. So you now take a lantern from FoH, dim it very low, and focus it so that it throws just enough light into the shadows on his face to make his features visible without losing the shadow effect. And that's all there is to it! - a prison cell which looks shadowy and threatening and in which our hero seems to be drawn and ill.

You can make it look cold by putting a frost filter ("gel") on the main light, the effect of which is to take away the yellow of artificial lighting and so get rid of its warmth. You could also put a steel-blue gel in the other overhead lanterns which would add to the cold effect, but I would leave the FoH lantern in open white (i.e. without any filtration) which would just warm up the scene sufficiently to avoid making it look like Alaska on a winter's night!

You can make the scene even more prison-like by using a gobo. This is a metal cut-out which is placed in the focal plane of a profile spot (see the next section for an explanation of these terms), so that it is projected onto the stage. There is a huge range of gobos which can be obtained from stage lighting suppliers, and they come in two parts: a gobo holder, which actually sits in the lantern's gate, and the gobo itself which you place in the holder. You can leave the holder permanenetly in the lantern and just swap the gobos when you want a change.

Anyway, back to Joseph and the...! You could use a prison bars gobo in a front of house profile spot which is focused on the stage. This will look like the shadows of prison bars cast across the stage, and across Joseph himself, if you like.

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(Technical)

Profiles produce the narrowest beam. They operate on a similar principle to a slide or film projector in that they have a focal plane (the "gate") and the image of anything placed in that focal plane will be projected by the lens. The lens can be moved to sharpen or soften the focus. Generally, of course, there is nothing at the focal plane so you get a very sharp edged circular beam of light. These lanterns, however, have beam-shaping shutters (four of them) which can be pushed into the focal plane so that you can change the shape of the beam to square, rectangular or triangular. You can also place a gobo in the focal plane.

Incidentally, it is also possible to get an iris diaphragm which can adjust the size of the circle of light projected by the lantern from the full width to a pin-spot.

There are two types of profile: fixed beam and zoom. These are exactly what they say: a fixed beam profile produces a beam of fixed spread, whereas you can vary the beam spread of a zoom. The size of the beam is measured by the angle it subtends at the focal plane and the most common profile to be found in schools has a beam angle of 23 to 25 degrees. Zoom profiles are described by the extremes of their beam angle: a 16/30 profile, for example, has a beam which is 16 degrees at its narrowest and 30 degrees at its widest.

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Control desks normally come with provision for controlling 6, 12, 18, 24, 36or even 48 dimmers and are referred to as, for instance, 12 way or 12 channel desks. 6 way desks normally have only one preset but the rest have two.

Preset? Oh no, more jargon! What's a preset, for goodness' sakes?

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Even if you have a lighting designer, he needs to be given a pretty tight brief, so give some thought to what you want from him or you can't complain if you don't get what you want.

I divide the stage up into areas. I give the lighting designer a stage plan with these areas marked, together with details of the mood of the lighting for each area. I also mark any specials I might want. These are lanterns which are not used for most of the time but are there to provide a special effect. This could include a lantern with a gobo, a spot which lights a particular actor for a particular scene, and so on.

I also describe the main lighting states. This concept is perhaps best explained by an example. When I did Godspell some years ago, I wanted two main states: a full-up state, with the stage brightly lit in open white, and a red state, in which the centre part of the stage was lit in red light which fell away into shadows at the side.

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