Drama 16 Stage Lighting

This photo was taken by me.

The theme is spooky and it fits this theme because it looks like it could be taken out of a spooky scene from a horror or Halloween film.

The lighting is white and bright like a space alien’s ship coming to abduct someone or that horridly spotless idea of the future that many films attempt to portray. The bright lighting depicted in the animated film Wall-E for inside the space ship where the lazy humans are is similar to this bright moonlight. The light is expansive causing a soft halo to surround it in the night sky. The brightness at night also is spooky because night is meant to be dark in the minds of many. This bright moonlight might peer into a window and wake people up like how the people were wakened up during the Light Riots. The light backlights the tree making it a shadowy silhouette. Moonlight has a history of spookiness with witches flying across it, cows jumping over it, and werewolf’s howling to it; this moonlit picture harkens back to this tradition with the light’s boldness and the silhouetted tree’s bareness. The white light and lingering halo of grey contrast with the night-time blackness like a mysterious power; this starkness and utter lack of an array of colors and stark would be enough to spook a child into hiding under the covers. For all a little child knows, this could be the eye of a huge monster coming to destroy it; and the power (high value) and abundance of this light makes it imposing. The dead, dark world that some might think exists in blackness comes back to life with the bright glow of the moon. However, it is not as alive as day; it is like a half-life or perhaps undead life. After all, in the total dark, one cannot see that the world does not look as alive as the day, but in partial light one can. Thus, the lighting in this picture is spooky as it is a sign that scary things might be out and since it makes things that look bright and alive during the day appear dead, creepy, and unnerving through the limited, bright, far-reaching, and contrasting with the dark surroundings white moonlight.

7 March 2016-6:40pm-A church on the streets of NYC (not far from Penn. Station)

The front of this church was lit up with several large film lights to make it look like day on the outside perhaps while a film crew shot an interior to exterior shot.

This feeling of falseness pervaded the scene since the light was like this big illuminated patch of sunshine in a dark in comparison world. It was like someone trying to create the white and pure idea of heaven on Earth. It was like the night was bleached out by this harsh, piercing light. The light was the awkward bleach stain on your clothes. It was the thing that seemed like it was trying too much to be the thing to be the actual thing. The main point that made this light seem so wrong and unmistakable from the sun is that this light was hot, white in color. It was warm as opposed to the cool bluish daylight. This warmth marked it as fake. The various angles of the light made the shadows small and few. The brightness and seeming power of the light claimed that it would disintegrate any great patches of darkness that might try to eek out their existence in this space. The light felt like a bully trying to make its victims shout that it was day despite this being a lie. The light was an illusion of day like if someone were to use fog from a fog machine to make a water dragon’s breath. Like all illusions, the light was artificial and not the natural. The light was an actor but not perhaps the best one from the perspective of a bystander. The camera’s footage might tell a different story.

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.

This photo is from a Huffington Post review of the 2015 Chichester Festival Theatre’s Guys and Dolls.

The theme is shadow; this photo from the number “Love Be a Lady” fits the shadow theme since shadows are used to emphasis the dark setting of this number: the sewer at night. This film uses shadow to create a pattern over the scene likely by way of a gobo.

Shadow strikes across the world in this photo. The darkness and shadows clash and are visible by the bright central white light. The light causes shadow and light patterned like the light went through prison bars or some similar bar structure in order to fall where and how it does in this photo. The lighting would fit Chicago’s cell block tango in certain parts, like when the innocent one speaks, since it has this dark feeling of imprisonment. The light has a mystery to it with its shadows and contrasting brightness. This mystery invites feelings of loneliness and thoughts of reflection since only shadows keep you company and the bright light is like that of a mirror reflecting a white wall in a lavatory. Shadow is a contrast and this photo contains that contrast though maybe not as starkly as a bright sun’s light causing shadows. The lighting here still has that stealthy and mysterious tone of shadow and the battle and yet symbiotic relationship between light and dark.

29 Feb. 2016 at 6:40pm – Outside Dutch Treats

A soft bluish white light from the glowing sign of Dutch Treats shines on the branches of a bare tree right outside this establishment.

The light was sad, cold, pure, and spooky. Blue and white, faint and bright, the light varies as it hits the tree in different places. The tree with the cool light looks skeletal and deathly. Death rides on a pale horse and if Death carried a staff made out of a tree, then the staff would be lit to look just like this. The gloom but yet beauty of this bright light reflecting off of the bare tree is haunting and captivating. The mood created by this lighting scene is gloomy and the lighting is brings forth a mood that one might feel at a funeral.

I took this photo last spring break in Washington D.C.

The theme is fun; this photo fits this theme, not because sun rhymes with fun, but because sunshine has many positive associations with it.

The sun beats down on the land illuminating everything and making shadows small and scarce. It is the big white, hot monster come to scare away the night. The vibrant colors of the world dance in this mass illumination; all the details of objects that in the dark or gloom would not be seen invite the eyes to come and play with them. “Frolic, skip, dance from one place to the next,” they shout. “Marvel, embrace this warm light, and bathe in it,” the light beckons the eyes. The brightness and apparent whiteness of the light glimmers off of the surfaces it touches causing parts of them to appear as white as a pearl. It is a treasured light; it is playful fun. Children at school who look out the window will crave to feel its rays. Some working people will want to throw off their hats and run out into it. If they do, then they might cartwheel with joy and excitement as the light sparkles around them. “The light! The light!” In winter when such light is scarce, are not some people depressed? Do they not feel bored and incapable of happiness? Thus, when the sun returns, the fun also returns. The sunlight, the light source that first gave us the ability to delight in what we see and that gives the eyes so much to play with, is a fun light.

I found this image online. It can be found at flickr.com.

The lighting theme is hot.

Orange, red, and yellow may be cooler in terms of degrees Kelvin but they are associated with warm things like the sun and fire. The big bright hues of the sky reflect the excessive warmth of the lighting. The sky is on fire, red hot. The golden ball of gaseous matter shines like the largest gem and greatest treasure in the sky and makes the sky its hue. It is yellow and white with a hint of orange like a match flame glowing bright to light a candle. It is thus a mass producer of heat parching the landscape like how a used match is charred. It silhouettes and gives a highlight of red to the things beneath it like what a dreamer might imagine the Martian landscape to look like. This red makes the world seem hot like a laser beam has been pointed at everything. The distribution is wide engulfing the entire sky and majority of the landscape in the warm colors and causing the silhouetting to occur. The light source glows with warmth, and the lighting is as hot as a bright red pepper tastes as a consequence.

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2. http://www.blingcheese.com/image/code/158/spotlights.htm

3. Amusement.

4. Theatre has always been amusing to me. The one element in theatre that always makes me think is the lighting design. Why is the designer doing this? That’s the question I ask regarding this picture. Why would four sharply lit spotlights be lit and positioned this way? Regardless of the reason, it is wonderful to look at. The sharply lit red overlaps the piercing orange and the radiant green. Completing the design is the faint blue, overlapping the orange and green. The small overlapped parts create four odd white colors that lay in between the shining colors aside them leaving this ascetically pleasing display of lights. This set-up of lights isn’t normally used but it make you wonder why it would be. Despite it’s abnormality, it is still a wonder to look at.

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2. http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/keeping-light-and-cool-with-smart-windows/

3. Bête Noire

4. A sunrise is one of the most spectacular things a person can lay eyes on. However, as I’m waking up this is the last thing I want to see. As my eyes got adjusted to the pitch blackness from sleeping, I become startled when a radiant beam of yellow and white blind me with a great ray of intensity. As it peeks out the window it fills my room with blaring reds, oranges, yellows and whites that tells me it’s time to wake up. Ironically enough, this beautiful spectacle of light is something I could never look forward to seeing.

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2. http://techpinions.com/samsung-is-stepping-into-the-spotlight/15460

3. Single Artificial Light Source.

4. The ray of a spotlight is the quintessence of a single artificial light source. This one majestic beam of light can tell many stories, setting he mood for any scene. As the dark surrounds the room, the bright and conical ray lights a specific area making that subject the focal point. It shines down white beams of light and casts a blue glow around the area. The simplicity of this light wouldn’t distract and audience. Its only purpose is to highlight who is under the spot. This simple white light  can turn an ordinary actor into the star of the show.

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