Most of my work tends to be in the realm of Opera, Dance, and Theater. As such I usually work with variations on three kinds of lights: Lekos, PARs, and Fresnels. These are fine lights and you can do quite a lot with them, but you can not do everything.
I am lighting an event tomorrow that will include ambient lighting of a large courtyard and a dance floor. The lighting is a collaboration between me and a friend of mine veering towards large scale installation. It should be a fun event to work.
Doing special events lighting is a whole different ballgame than working in live performance. In this case, the technology is very different. Here we will be using a lot of LED moving head fixtures and several effects projectors.
Not only is the technology different, but the style of working an event like this is much more on the fly than most of the work I do. At the same time, there are similarities which parallel these two worlds. For a play I might send my drawings off weeks before I have seen a single rehearsal. As such I have to plan out not only everything I intend to do regarding lighting the show, but I have to build in flexibility so that quick changes and alterations can be made in the very limited time available to us in tech. For tomorrow’s event, we met at the shop and talked through what equipment we would place where and combine how and so forth. With a few moments of “Oh let’s turn that on and see what it does.”
The event is at a church with some very nice architecture that should take light beautifully. In addition to lighting several rooms, we will light a large exterior stone wall with various colors and textures. Some of the ideas are about accenting architectural elements, while others are about transforming them. I remember a wedding I lit several years ago at the Brooklyn library. A less than aesthetically pleasing building inside, but quite impressive in scale. I had to transform the space with light in order to bring the qualities of the wedding into that not so romantic room.
Rather than being a carefully drawn out plot, we have a large pile of gear from which to draw. Certain ideas are very clearly formed, and several of the looks have been well thought through. At the same time, the event itself has a DIY ethic which means there could be any number of unexpected additions upon our arrival tomorrow. Because we do not necessarily know what we will be walking into, there has to be a certain amount of flexibility built into the lighting rig.
In some ways this is no different than live performance. I have had countless instances of scenery being built wrong, or me not receiving the final revision drawings, or the FOH positions being drawn in the wrong location on the house paperwork, or some other SNAFU which caused my well laid plans to get tossed to the side.
While there are some difference in terms of how the show or event gets prepped, the underlying skills remain the same. We must create a beautiful work of art that fulfills the project lead’s vision while making split second decisions under high pressure conditions in a very finite span of time.
Our work is not luxurious. We do not have time to sit around and wax poetic (a luxury I give myself in this blog precisely because it does not exist in the work). Rather we have a few seconds in which time to make a decision, see if it works, and change it if necessary. Time is too expensive to spend in anything other than the action of creating a more perfect work.
We are limited by time, and money, and resources, and personnel. The one thing we can not be limited by is creativity.
This is something that spans not only lighting designers, whether you light Opera, or parties, or store windows, but all designers. Our creativity is built around a deadline. We must produce. We have no other option. The doors will open when they are advertised to open. And we don’t have the luxury to not have created a beautiful product.
