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Light on the Subject
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By Justin Lang
Documenting Lighting Design,
Then and Now
Paperwork is important in almost every aspect of
one’s personal and professional life. Starting from
the beginning—our birth certificate—paperwork
just keeps adding up in our lives. In our professional
lives—specifically in lighting design—paperwork is the
key to one’s success in doing their job quickly and efficiently.
Without a paper trail, we would get lost in the
numbers and information needed to stay organized and
perform our jobs well.
Lighting designers have been using paperwork to
convey how things are laid out, connected and executed
Virtuality has led to better
paperwork—and a better
chance to study and learn
from the pre-digital
era channel hook-ups, cue sheets, shop orders and all
the associated paperwork, were completed by hand.
Need to make multiple copies for hang and focus? Get
that pad of paper back out and make more copies.
Then came photocopiers. Creating a master cue sheet
with channels numbers, the show name, and the designer’s
information allowed for a cleaner and more efficient
design process. As cues came up, rather than breaking
out a blank piece of paper and ruler, a designer could
simply pencil in the channel levels on a reproduced
copy of the typed cue sheet.
Courtesy of the Theatrical Lighting Database
Courtesy of Kevin Adams
Jules Fisher’s light plot for the 1968 Broadway production of Hair
on stage since the first light was focused. In the beginning,
paperwork was simple only because sophisticated
lighting and control systems just didn’t exist. Laying out
a lighting plot consisted of putting a pencil to paper and
drafting simple lighting symbols that referenced where
lights should be hung in the space. Before the modern
Kevin Adams' light plot for the 2008 Broadway revival of Hair. In the 40 years since the original production
the digital revolution changed both the lights and the paperwork around lighting.
And now computers have changed the way we work
and deal with paperwork and communicate our ideas.
No longer do we need to draft a plot, or create a simple
magic sheet or any other piece of paperwork we might
need by hand—that is, unless want to. Keeping track of
fixture counts, channel assignments, hook-ups and all
24 June 2010 • www.stage-directions.com