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Light on the Subject
By M.C. Friedrich
Create a Light Plot
on a Dime
“No lights” doesn’t mean
no lighting. . .
Figure 1
When beginning a lighting design, there can
be any number of reasons the designer is
working “on a dime.” This month and next, I’ll
list some of the most common issues I have faced and
their resolutions — and how these were accomplished
on painfully limited budgets. The solutions assume
that renting or borrowing what is needed is out of the
budget/question, and that high-tech miracles won’t
happen.
Challenge #1: Not enough lighting instruments or,
worse, no lighting instruments
If you do have some instrumentation, you could
try to work with what you have and just go with
general lighting areas. It’s not very interesting, but
it is illumination. The more dramatic solution is to
give up on washes and have carefully placed specials
(Figure 1). For this to be effective, you will, of course,
have to work closely with your director’s blocking and
rely heavily on the actors’ abilities to find their light
(think spike tape). If possible, you may choose to do
some refocus of lower boom-mounted instruments at
intermission.
No lighting instruments? Run to the nearest hardware
store and buy PARs: lamp, reflector and lens all
in one neat, inexpensive package. The necessary sockets
will be right beside them on the shelf and require
minimal wiring to attach connectors. With just sockets
and PARs, I’ve made booms that looked, and worked,
like stadium lights. I’ve also worked with clip-on work
lights from the hardware store for very short throws. If
you do go this route, be sure to hide them on the set.
Challenge #2: Dimmer shortage or no dimmers
If you’re short some dimmers, it is possible to
slightly overload the dimmers you have with instruments
that do not need to run at full intensity. Make
sure your math is good, or you’ll be tripping breakers.
Divide the dimmer wattage by the instrument wattage
to get the maximum percentage at which you
can set the dimmer. For example, if you load a 2.4 K
dimmer with three instruments lamped to 1,000 watts
each, then 80% is the maximum level for that dimmer
(2,400/3,000 = .80).
If full intensity is required, repatching is still an
option, even in these days of dimmer-per-circuit. For
the youngsters out there, I’m not talking about softpatching
a dimmer into a channel. In the old days,
when theatres had far more circuits than dimmers,
patch panels and hard-patching circuits into dimmers
were part of the setup, allowing the patch operator to
unpatch (unplug) one circuit from a dimmer and patch
Figure 2
14 January 2008 • www.stage-directions.com