Drama 16 Stage Lighting

      Single Light key

Source: Me, October 21, 2016 in street island in front of Resident Buildings.

Theme: Single Subject, Single Light Source

Description: A single light shines on the tree from behind. The light gleams at an acute angle from most of the top of the tree. Behind the tree is a resident building, while on the lower right corner there is a shade of red. While the top of the tree is an intense yellow glow, there are small glimmers of white coming down.

To me, this tree symbolizes the how life may block the what can easily be seen in front of you. We can be so focused on what is in front of us that we forget the things that are easy to see behind it. It overgrows what should be important for your life. Despite this, we still see what is in front of us and not what else can come from the front.

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.

Time: 10pm on Wednesday, at the Met

Objective Description: I watched the lights fade during the last scene of Manon Lescaut, where the title character dies.

Subjective Description: It was the last scene of the opera Manon Lescaut, and Manon and her lover were stuck in a wasteland. She was weak and dying. The light in this scene was pale blue and pale orange, and throughout the scene, the colors slowly faded to monotone colors. It was so subtle that I didn’t even pick up on it until Manon said her last words and died in her lover’s arms. It was then that I realized all of the color had left the scene and everything was somewhere between black and white. I was amazed with this lighting choice and thought it mirrored death perfectly.

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.