2007 Aug 29 - Wed

Lighting for Moliere's Sisterhood

The last I wrote regarding lighting effects for The Sisterhood was in an article back on Aug 11 where I discussed getting the equipment ready prior to design.

Working with the equipment is a whole other story.

The set really wasn't ready for use by the actors until about Aug 29. All I could really do in the meantime was get most of the basic lights mounted and pointed in the right direction. I lit the stage with cells of three lights, with the three lights each of a different color: amber for a warm wash, a blue for a cold wash, and a lavender for part of the wash with a black actor.

In my previous article, I wrote about obtaining a second USB-DMX box so I could use the sliders on the existing lighting board as input. It did arrive, and I did use it. It was interesting to work with LightFactory to figure out which was the input and which was the output, based upon the flashing activity light on the convertor. I also found that the input channel froze every once in a while (perhaps the light board was set to send too fast). In any case, I found that I really didn't need slider input once I discovered that one can layout channels on a canvas in LightFactory. This turned out to be even better than trying to cross-patch channels in some sort of meaningful layout. By arranging the three color cells along with a no-blue blue downlight in how they lighted the stage, adjusting dimmers became easy. I simply control clicked (for selecting the amber channels) or box-selected dimmers (for the channels in one or more cells), then used the mouse scroll wheel to increase or decrease intensity as desired. I have no desire to use a lighting board after experiencing the ease in which the software allowed me to make changes on the fly.

I did spend a couple long days trying to tame the color changers though. The software made it easy to select colors and intensity, but it got in the way when trying save and retry groups and palettes. I ended up submitting five or six bug reports one morning after figuring out how to work around my frustrations. I was surprised when I received responses back that same day from the vendor to say that they had fixed the bugs. That was excellent turn around. However, that does cut both ways: why did the software have these silly bugs in the first place, but when encountered, they did fix the problems quickly.

I did spend quite a bit of time in the grid for light focussing. The PDA based remote focus software worked well in conjunction with LightFactory. I just wish it had a slider, and a better scroll back buffer. I had to turn off power management on my PDA so it would remain on, otherwise I'd have to restart the remote software as it would lose the connection to LightFactory.

For lighting, there were five major areas: an outside patio up stage right, a hallway with red wall on stage left, a bar down stage right, two sofas up stage center, and main stage area down stage center. I used three color changers in the patio area at various angles to provide various day time color changes and mixes. I used a single color changer in the hallway to cast a purple light over the hallway phone. The bar had a Source Four angled and shuttered to give a hightlight to the liquor bottles as a kind of ornamentation.

For the remainder of the stage, there was one light cell (three colors plus down light) for each of the two sofas, one for the french door entry way, three cells for down stage center, and one for the bar. I ended up having to do three long throw Source Fours to get stage left as regular lights cast a bad shadow into the hallway (only 8 ft walls).

The director decided to highlight certain parts of the stage by dimming cells in other parts of the stage when no activity was being undertaken. Ten and fifteen second fades were used to make the transitions subtle to the audience.

This play was used to come up to speed with the software. The usual excuse, if I'd had the time, I could have done more interesting things with the fades more often. As it was, it was good. A photographer took some pictures of the set as lighted for intermission set decoration. I hope to get some loaded here soon.