About a year and a half ago I lit a dance piece that explored the relationship between humanity and technology. It had a large video component including live interactive video. In considering the light I wanted to create a world bridging the space between the human and the technological. The lighting rig was small and consisted of a mixture of incandescent lights and fluorescents. All the lights were in a color range of 4500-5600K. Daylight.
The use of fluorescents was obvious once I made it but my reasoning behind their use in that piece was a little different than “I want cold and mechanical.” If you look at the color spectrum of an incandescent light it is a gentle wave with peaks in the amber range and valleys in the cyan, but soft and gentle slopes define the nature of the light emitted from those sources. Fluorescent light is something else entirely. Like other discharge sources the wave form of the light spectrum is comprised of sharp 90 degree peaks and valleys as well as violent spikes in certain sections of the visible spectrum.
It was this digital quality that I was interested in. And while the fluorescent is an explicit example of digital light, behind the scenes it is all digital. With the exception of the most primitive lighting systems every light used in live performance is controlled by a computer. We see intensity values in the human friendly 0-100% range but this is just for ease of readout displays. The computer sends 0-255 hex values across a digital network to dimmers which convert those values into percentages of a 10v sine wave that gets chopped at various points depending upon the value received. map(0, 255, 0, 10); map(0, 10, 0, 100);
But light, especially incandescent light, is intensely analog. Anyone who has tried to do a zero count blackout and been frustrated when a zero count really takes about 0.5 seconds to reach complete darkness knows this. The problem is made worse dealing with larger lamps like a 5K where a blackout can take upwards of ten seconds.
Working in this digital medium for a while now I have seen points of interest come and go. I will find myself obsessed with color for months or years on end and then spend long periods of time only working with monochromatic palettes. I will explore texture or angle or the very quality of light itself in similar fad like ways. Yet two currents of aesthetic inquiry remain constant in my work. One is an interest in natural and organic forms and movements. The other, and deeply related to the first, is an inquiry into random chance and chaotic events.
Light provides ample opportunity to explore both of these ideas. Most digital lighting control is sufficiently sophisticated to get decent random effects tried out and there is as much or more technology available to explore ideas of organic forms.
At the same time there are distinct limitations. The scale of many of the ideas I want to try are cost prohibitive in the lighting realm, certainly on my own meager budget. While I can try out a handful of ideas on various shows, most shows I design do not lend themselves to the kinds of explorations that I am truly interested in. Thus it becomes a game of waiting for that one show to test that one idea.
Enter the world of computer graphics. It only takes a couple minutes to copy the code for John Conway’s Game of Life. From there, myriad parameters can be explored and manipulated for interesting results. Even the largest lighting rig does not contain the complexity to look at emergent forms and patterns in chaos at any scale of interest. Yet just a few lines of code can do all that and more.
The world we live in is technologic and interconnected. For art to truly capture the spirit of the world it must engage directly with that reality. Embracing and exploring our increasingly digital lives is both obvious and obscure. It is easy to put a cell phone on stage, or build a sculpture out of used computer parts, or paint with pixels. But doing that in such a way that furthers our understanding of our own humanity is the difficult task.
With the addition of a single color and a slight blur effect the Game of Life evolves from blinky computer simulation, to lifelike organic drama. It is turning a microscope on bits and capturing their millisecond of life. The line between the analog nature of life and the digital nature of computers is thin if not outright illusory. The shifting pixels on the screen become a life and death battle for supremacy. Survival of the fittest. Light and dark become life and death.
Having been in the business of creating fantasy worlds my entire adult life, I never would have thought that moving on to such a small stage would open up so many possibilities.
First up is rotation. Whether you are dealing with a template in a moving light with rotation ability, or a standalone fixture like the GAM TwinSpin or Rosco Double Gobo Rotator, rotation is a powerful tool for the lighting designer. Spinning templates can be a lot of fun for music events, bands, and the like. This is often what people first think of when they imagine a rotating template. However, rotating templates can have some powerfully subtile effects as well. Placing a static leaf or cloud pattern in a light with an abstract rotating template behind it can give a slight sense of movement without overpowering a composition. Getting the focus just right, such that the rotation recedes to the background, is critical in these cases.
Linear movement is another wonderful way to create motion with templates. Whether it is the vertical rise of flames or the slow horizontal shifting of clouds, linear motion, like that created by the GAM Film/FX, can be wonderful. These effects, like rotation effects, require a very careful attention to focus if you are trying to achieve any degree of subtlety. It is too easy to make these effects look like effects and not like an integrated part of a larger composition.
Abstract gobos can be particularly good for delineating location in large musicals. While a full scenic shift is great, augmenting that with a total transformation in the lighting environment can truly make the difference in a production. Linear patterns that drape over scenery or scrape across walls create quite a different effect than geometric shards of lights cast across the floor. Abstract breakups like R77764, focused very soft, lightly highlighting scenery or perhaps a framed photograph or poster, can really bring that element to life.
Abstract templates are fantastic for providing a sense of architecture and place to a scene, party, or music show. A simple change in gobo, from leaves to a geometric template for example, can tell us quickly that the action has moved from outside to inside. A pattern projected on walls and ceilings can fast give light a direct connection to a theme party or event. Whatever your situation, the use of abstract templates are very powerful.
With a live act, the kind of template used can be guided by the style of music being played. A techno band might want more linear shapes, perhaps circuit board patterns or something to that effect. A psychedelic jam band on the other hand may call for more swirly organic shapes. Intuition and feel are your best guides when working with music. 
Cloud templates come in several varieties and each have their benefits and drawbacks. Standard steel, like with leaves, provide a cookie cutter cut out of a shape that, with the proper attention to angle and sharpness can be either cartoonish or subtle. Even a template as silly as R78169 can, with the proper focus, turn into a very powerful effect when designing a sky. 
The first concern is the shape of the gobo. Sadly, this is something that is too often overlooked when considering a template for use in a production. When I say shape of template I do not mean the exact shape of the leaves themselves, but the overall shape of the pattern. As you can see from the example of R77732 the pattern has a round shape overall. No matter how you point the light, no matter how much softness, this template will always look round. While this might not be a concern in certain styles of production, or when you have a full stage wash on, it does become a concern for more naturalistic compositions. If you want to vary the intensity of the individual lights to pull focus to a certain area of the stage you will end up with little circles of leaves of varying intensity. Worse still, if you just want to turn on a single light, you end up with a circle of leaves which looks hokey at best.
When using a template like R77774 there is no concern that the template will look round. In fact it is impossible to focus the light in such a way that a single instance of the template appears round. The potential pitfall with these style templates is that you often need more physical instruments creating a tighter beam overlap in order to get a clean full stage look. The benefits of not having a round dot of leaves, however, far outweighs the need for greater precision in drafting, hang, and focus. There are plenty of examples of non-round templates but they are definitely the minority when it comes to leaf patterns.
Once the shape consideration has been resolved you need to consider density. Our example above of R77774 is great for more open sun filled compositions. The template lets a lot of light through while still maintaining the character of light through trees. But perhaps you want your templates to be more of an accent. Perhaps all that light, and the varied size of the spaces between steel, is not the right look. A template like R77733 gives a more uniform, dense, feel the the light. Similar in density to the R77732 noted above, this template shares with R77774 the characteristic of not being round. What density of template is wanted will be determined by the dramatic needs of the scene in question.
