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Lighting is more than just illuminating part of a stage or venue, lighting is an art form and can be used to set the scene, control the mood, and most importantly, illuminate your stage so everything and everyone on it can be seen clearly. In this video, we’re going to be discussing types of lighting effects and what fixtures you’re able to use, to achieve the exact look you envision.
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Let’s begin with something many of us will recognize, THE SPOTLIGHT!
When you want to focus attention on a subject, you’ll want to use a spotlight. What you will typically see, in a theater setting or a house of worship, is a spotlight illuminating a single focal point while the background fades into darkness. This not only focuses attention on a single spot on stage but helps to enhance whatever mood it is you’re going for, whether it’s dramatic, comedic, romantic, and so on. Spot fixtures can vary in size and build.
First, the ellipsoidal. You may hear others refer to them as ERS or Leko fixtures, but for now let’s stick to ellipsoidal. These are designed to produce a strong, focused beam of light and can reach far throw distances. Throw distance, often just referred to as “throw”, is the distance between the fixture and the surface on which it’s casting light. The cool thing about ellipsoidal lights is you can swap out front lenses to change the beam angle, which in turn will change the diameter and intensity of your spot. If you aren’t sure what beam angle is, think of it like this:
A narrow beam angle is going to be focused and intense, while a wide beam angle is going to provide a softer, wider spread of light.
To have even more control of the direction of the light from an ellipsoidal, you can incorporate attachments such as barn doors which are popular for framing. Ellipsoidals are also a great fixture for use with gobos, allowing you to add interesting patterns onto walls, ceilings, or floors for more elaborate stage productions.
For smaller areas, you could use pin spots, smaller spotlights that are great for highlighting individual items on a stage. Pin spots can also be used for special effects lighting and to illuminate mirror balls.
Stage productions could also benefit from a follow spot, which is a yoke-mounted (text definition of yoke on screen?) spotlight that is operated by a technician. As the name states, this fixture follows performers, and the size of the beam can be adjusted manually to target specific spots on stage.
You can even use spots as effect lighting by incorporating moving head spot fixtures which, when multiple moving heads are used together, can create exhilarating and entertaining light shows. You can change the colors or add gobo patterns to get more out of your spot fixtures and add effects like fog or haze to use them in a more atmospheric way.
The next type of lights we’re going to discuss are wash lights.
As the name suggests, wash lights are designed to wash over an area. Wash fixtures produce soft light that’s ideal for lighting large areas evenly. Great for filling out a space, it’s common to see wash lighting used on stages, dance floors, and not only do wash lights give a very natural look, but they are key to creating ambience. There a couple of fixtures that are great for wash lighting…PARs and Fresnels.
Native just means the state of a fixture once it’s turned on. Let’s take a closer look!
PAR stands for “Parabolic Aluminized Reflector” …which described their earlier construction. Older PAR lights consisted of a light source, a lens, and a parabolic reflector with an aluminum surface. These elements were packaged in something resembling a can, which is why the fixtures would be referred to as PAR Cans. PAR fixtures are typically favored when trying to achieve a wash effect. These days, you’ll typically see PAR fixtures using LEDs instead of traditional lamps. This is beneficial for many reasons: they require less maintenance, they give off significantly less heat, and they’re going to help you cut down that electricity bill. You’ll also notice that these fixtures are slimmer and lighter than those that still use lamps so that’s a big plus when it comes to mounting these things. But you’ll still get plenty of lumens! What’s a lumen? Well…
Simply put, a lumen is a measure of how much light you’re getting. The more lumens a light has, the brighter it is. Another term you might hear is footcandle, which is also a measure of light intensity, but is based on how much surface area a light can cover. There’s a whole science to it, we’ll probably throw a graphic of that over here, but footcandles are a common unit of measure among lighting professionals.
Now, on to Fresnels!
Similar to PAR fixtures are Fresnel fixtures. Fresnels are also favored when it comes to wash lighting, but there are some key differences between a PAR fixture and a Fresnel fixture. You’ll notice that the lens of a Fresnel consists of a series of circles. This design helps to carry the light a further distance because compared to a PAR, the throw of a Fresnel light (remember that term?) is not going to be as far. This results in a softer, wider light compared to that of a PAR fixture, so a Fresnel is going to be best used for accent lighting whether it be top, back, or front lighting. Which is great way for us to segue into lighting placement.
When you’re lighting a stage or a venue, it’s not just what you light a room with, but also how you light a room.
You might hear terms like uplighting or downlighting, and those phrases mean exactly what you think they mean. Uplighting is when you have lights at ground level pointing up, something you’ll typically see at events like weddings, school dances, or anniversary parties. Fixtures are placed on the ground pointing up along walls or backdrops and are a quick and simple way to accent a room. Uplighting fixtures can vary. Individual LED and Hex LED fixtures will produce tighter beams when set up along walls. If you’d prefer a wider beam of light, COB (or Chip On Board) uplighting would be the way to go. You also have lighting bars and other types of fixtures that can be used for the same purpose.
Downlighting is when the fixture is mounted high and pointing downward, also referred to as top lighting. These are your spotlight and wash fixtures, but the term applies to any fixture that is set up to point down. You can use downlighting to accent walls similarly to uplighting, but the result is going to be a little different in terms of light dispersion. Take into account the distance you need to illuminate when using uplighting and downlighting fixtures. The further the distance, the more power you’re going to need. If you’re using uplighting on walls that are 30’ tall or more, you’re going to want that up light to reach as high as it can. Same with downlighting, a weak light isn’t going to properly illuminate the intended area.
When you’re lighting a stage, you’ll also hear terms like front lighting, back lighting, and even side lighting.
Front lighting is lighting pointed at the stage from the front of house. This is primarily to provide visibility, so your audience can see what and who is on the stage clearly. A smaller venue can typically get away with using PAR or Fresnel fixtures for front lighting but, as you move up in venue size, you’ll want to begin looking at ellipsoidal fixtures.
Backlighting is when light fixtures are moved upstage, illuminating subjects from behind which creates additional depth.
And finally side lighting, which is helpful when one needs to add additional shape to people on stage. You can set up lights for high side lighting by mounting them to bars, or battens, overhead. You can also set up lights on booms for low side lighting.
When you combine these lighting placements, you’re able to come up with really creative ways to light a stage, which can certainly elevate a performance and take it to new heights.
Let’s see, we’ve gone over basic stage lighting fixtures, lighting placement, and learned some new vocabulary words! That was a lot, but when it comes to lighting there’s a lot to go over. So, it should come as no surprise when I tell you there’s a follow up to this video where we go over moving heads and effect lighting. So be sure to like this video, subscribe to our channel, and click the notification bell to make sure you’re notified when that next video drops. In the meantime, you can get the lighting fixtures you saw in this video today and much more over at I DJ Now.