Lighting Observation 12.2
1) 4/27/12 – 10:30 AM – In Spiegel Theater working on the light board for SA
2) OBJECTIVE DESCRIPTION: I was programming and setting colors for the LED’s in Spring Awakening. The color mixing for the Pars is additive and when I made pink colors there was a blue center and a red ring around it. The focus beam was blue and the focus field was red.
3) SUBJECTIVE DESCRIPTION: I see it only fitting to close my last lighting observation of this class by writing about a lighting moment when I was actually designing my own show. Designing Spring Awakening was not easy on many accounts, the main one being the fact that I was designing for a designer. Working with LEDs was also a big challenge as the LEDs have properties found in their functions that are not found in other, conventional stage lighting. One of the properties that was difficult for me was that the lights do not dim smoothly. Another aspect of the lights that was both convenient and a bother was that the colors of the light were created through additive color mixing. This allows me to select almost any color imaginable for the lights; however, they do not always mix so cleanly.
In one of my cues I was mixing a series of LED thinpar64s to be a dark pink color on the walls of the spiegel. Now that the walls are finally black, the light is absorbed very well in the space; however, the lights do not always mix well. When I mixed this color I noticed that even though the color I was selecting was pink, once it reached the wall, it was blue and red. Obviously the pink is created through the mixing of these two primary colors. When I paused and looked at the lights that I had brought up, I noticed that the focus beam and the focus field were being highlighted in different colors from one another. The focus beam was blue while the focus field was displayed in a red ring around it. As frustrating as things were becoming at this point, with Bryan calling out ideas for lights and the colors not mixing, I had to take a moment and look at the light on the wall. It was there to show me that here I was designing a show and understanding all of the properties of things that were happening to the light that I was working on.
Despite the fact that the blue and red individual LEDs are evenly spaced across the face of the PAR, the projection of the light was received in two distinct areas. This is simply due to the fact that our eyes cannot focus on these two colors at the same time because they are at opposite ends of the visible spectrum. Looking at the lights it was clearly defined by the two colors where the focus beam and field were positioned. It was reassuring that I was able to see a problem, recognize the cause of the problem, and fix it due to the knowledge that I have gained in the last 12 weeks.