Drama 16 Stage Lighting

1) DATE-TIME-LOCATION: 3/17/21- 3:00 pm- Shapiro Family Hall- Blackbox

2) OBJECTIVE DESCRIPTION: When my friend and I walked into the black box because he had forgotten something there, it was completely dark and we needed our flash lights.

3) SUBJECTIVE DESCRIPTION: Stepping into a blackness that completely envelopes you. You cannot see your own limbs and who knows where the edge of the floor comes to an abrupt halt. A few lights pulled out to fight the darkness and the white light bounces all around the room and off objects. It feels like a dangerous quest, for something as small as a laptop charger.

1) Photo is from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-spotlight-effect-3024470

2) THEME: Isolation

3) DESCRIPTION: A woman stands alone under a spotlight that is right above her head. The rest of the photo is dark. 

1) This photo is from https://historymaniacmegan.com/2015/08/04/rules-for-dealing-with-wild-animals/

2) Night Life

3) Hearing a noise in the dead of night, they wander out into the backyard with a flashlight, searching for what could’ve made that rustling. Finally, the flashlight finds the source of the sound in the darkness; a tiny opossum. 

1. January 31, 2018 – 5:43pm – Hofstra University’s Intramural Field
2. I am standing in the parking lot looking at Hofstra’s Intramural Fields. It is completely dark outside. The streetlight in front of me is tilted sideways casting light upon the bottom of a tree to its right. Only the bottom right branches are lit up orange. The lighting highlights all of the tiny details of the main branch, and everything else around it is in darkness.
3. The lighting gives off a dark mood. The tiny, skinny branches that are highlighted by the light look as if they are a mysterious creature’s claws emerging from the dark. Nothing can be seen in the distance, and there is a sense of hopelessness. The orange light itself, creates a feeling of comfort, yet the light it gives off gives the viewer a sense of fear.

1) DATE-TIME-LOCATION: April 12th, 9:20pm, Dorm room

2) OBJECTIVE DESCRIPTION: The tv is paused on a blue screen and the lights are off.

3) SUBJECTIVE DESCRIPTION: The only light in the room is the blue from the screen and street lights peeking through the blinds. There’s an eerie feel about the room. I’m afraid to leave the bed for fear of monsters underneath it. The lights from outside awash the room in shadows. It is time to continue the show and forget what lurks outside. Laughter is the best cure to fight the darkness.

Spooky diagram

Source: http://keywordsuggest.org/gallery/374908.html

Theme: Spooky

Description: A girl is standing alone, holding an axe. Her face and lower body are shrouded in shadows. The light shining through the window turns makes the blackness retreat as a haunting green aura fills the room. What is seen besides the are the cracked walls and rotting tiles of the room.

To me, this is the what holding onto the past looks like and not moving on. Just as ghosts cannot move onto the afterlife, this photo is stuck in a rotting place full of rotting memories.

1. Tuesday, January 31 at 7:45pm outside Spiegel Theatre, looking at the path leading towards the weird statue.
2. By this point in the night, it was almost completely dark, so pretty much the only light was coming from the lampposts and reflecting off of the snow that covered the ground.
3. This moment felt very calm; the darkness was heavy but the soft balls of light provided a sense of hope by illuminating the natural beauty of a fresh coat of snow over the trees and the grass. The light also reflected the slick wet pavement of the pathway through these trees—this told me that though the storm was over, it wouldn’t be forgotten any time soon.

My camera automatically took this photo while I was filming a community theatre production of White Christmas back home in Maryland.

The theme is “single source; artificial light.” There is only one light on the actor at this point in the piece, and it is artificial.

The light brings details to the surface from beneath the waves of darkness, the endless and mysterious abyss. It causes its own spots of darkness though. It penetrates and bounces back off the subject under its rays. The colors pop beneath its whitish spread and are the only thing attracting the eye in this darkness. The edges of the light fall off sharply and leave much to guess about the image. The bright, seething, and only light in this photo is the point of clarity and tension as it contrasts with the surrounding pit of blackness. It is a mysterious, bright, hot, white, harsh, light.

2 Feb. 2016 – 9:18am – Classroom 0028 in the Basement of Breslin Hall

The room was dark besides the florescent light I let in from the hallway as I cracked the door open and a soft bluish green glow from the computer screen way over on the other side of the room. This light from the screen illuminated a circle on the white wall to the left of it, and one of the technical difficulty emergency phones was located just off middle in the circle. It is the lighting on the wall that caught my eye, not the pools of florescent lights that wafted onto the floor a few feet in front of me.

The lighting was mysterious and eerie since it was surrounded by shadows and darkness and since it was such a peculiar color. This lighting would not have been out of place in a murder mystery play in which a character is scared of the phone because the ringing of the phone always signals something bad. Thanks to the hue, the lighting seemed sickly. In the murder mystery play example, this could represent the mindset and paranoia of the afraid character. It mirrors the feeling of quintessential fear that a person home alone at night who starts hearing spooky sounds must possess. Soft, circular, and contrasting with the surroundings like something out of another universe, it could have been the light that emitted from an alien spaceship’s beams of abduction. This lighting moment touched a chord and got under the viewer’s skin by being a reminder of mortality and that there is so much uncertainty out there. It presented the fear of the unseen and the fear of the unknown mysteries of life like when a person will die. Thus, the lighting resembled in color, distribution, and intensity whatever the torch or lamp of the Grim Reaper looks like and inspired fear and thoughts of the supernatural in its beholder.

1. 4/22/14 at around 11:30 at my friend Anthony’s house.

2. Christmas lights hung around his pitch black room. One strand is colored. The other sides of his room are completely dark.

3. Recently my friend moved into a new place that has quite a few problems. One of them being that most of the light blubs were burnt out. Because of this, his room gets shrouded in darkness at night. To eliminate some of the darkness, he uses two long strands of Christmas lights. Two sides of the room is illuminated with a row of colored lights that leave small traces of color on the wall. They leave the wall lit with faint reds, bright yellows, rich greens, brilliant blues, and soft pinks. They occasionally flicker leaving a small portion of the wall in darkness. However, these dimmed lights strikingly light up half of his room very well.  These shining lights are a beauty to look at, with their faint twinkle that brighten the black of the night. We almost don’t want regular lights in his room.