Lighting tech notes for Costumers The tech crew is here for you, and really wants to do everything it can to make your masquerade presentation the best it can be, within reason. Talk to us. Help us to help you surprise the audience. In the thick of rehearsals we may seem really busy, but you're the costumers and our customers (get it?) and fufilling your needs is our priority. Timing and rehearsal are by far the most important things for making your presentation run smoothly. This is why we make a point of allowing as much rehearsal block as we can -- we're fairly proud of that, in fact. On stage, any entry has less than five seconds to set down its environment, mood, pacing, and backstory. Usually it's within 2-3 seconds, when the lights have barely finished coming on and the soundtrack just started playing. Timing is crucial here, in all the aspects -- lights, sound, position on stage, everything. People respond immediately to light and color, sound and movement -- in that moment, mood and emotion are triggered. If the idea is to just show off a costume, you've got it fairly easy. But even then you want a smooth run that stays out of its own way and still makes the entry look its best -- some flub in even a simple presentation can severely detract from the impact because then that's all the audience will think about. "Ooh, tech blew it!" Therefore, the more we know about what's coming, the better. We can also help you balance between "just light on stage" and an insane 3-page cue-list. We've pretty much seen it all. The rest of this document is all about lighting. We will try to show you all of these components when we meet for rehearsal, but since we must run through all that fairly fast, we designed this helpful handout that you can study at your leisure. There's light on stage, and then there's stage lighting. A total look is the sum of several parts involving color, direction, and often time. You'll hear the terms "warm fred" or "cool fred" used fairly often. That's as close as we get to "just light on stage", but even that tries to bring in several different components to bring out all the costume detail. And depending on what we see, minor tweaks may get added to that on the fly during the actual masquerade. But there's so much more available. A look can be built in layers, which we'll describe from the back and work forward. We generally assume that most entries enter in darkness and set up a first pose on stage, and then the lights and sound come on. You can also enter in light. You get to think about how your entry and your exit should flow, which will then govern how you put the layers and components and timing together. * The cyclorama, or cyc, is the big cloth backdrop. Think of it as a big blank canvas that we can turn any color you want -- almost any shade can be generated by mixing red, green, and blue. It makes a large lit background, and if it's the only thing on, you're a black silhouette on stage. Effects like this are great in dance, especially at openings or endings where a performer strikes a pose against it. There are a couple of things to avoid with the backdrop -- making it the same color as the costume, which will then disappear against it, or having it be the same color as your flesh. The muslin it's made of is a light beige, not white, so it's a little closer to some fleshtones to begin with and may light the same way as your face does from the front. Generally throwing a fairly saturated mix on the cyc easily hides its natural color and creates a nice contrasting background that helps define the environment. * Side and back light outlines a figure, partially lights it, and emphasizes shape. If the light comes from a bit behind an entrant, the face is mostly hidden but shape and movement are very pronounced -- for example, back-light from one side can be used for a bit of opening mystery, before the main lights come on -- but don't ride that for too long if you want the costume seen. Light from both sides is used all the time in dance, where body contours are important. Is your costume a mountain troll with lots of inflatable "Hulk" muscles? Side light will really punch those out. Deep, saturated side light can lend an almost cartoon-like outlining to things, especially in two radically different color mixes. * Let's talk about mood. Warm tends toward red or amber light, but also includes sunlight (to some extent), that homey glow around the kitchen hearth, candles, fire, and ruddy peasant stock. Cool is more blue, embodied in ice and snow, death, solitude, night time, and underwater environments. They are not mutually exclusive, of course -- the other side of a torch-lit person will likely be a cooler shade of night. A split warm and cool look is often used to bring realism, because we see different light on objects like this all the time. But one can emphasize the warmer end or the cooler end depending on desired feeling, and to a very variable extent. And it can change in the middle to provide a shift or a surprise! So by all means tell us about any time of day, place, or other surrounding context that you think your costume fits into -- we may not have seen the movie you're recreating, so you have to bring us up to speed on such things. * Next in the list is texture. Light isn't necessarily uniform, especially in the woods. We use "breakup" projections, obscurely named "gobos", to throw a dappled, variable light that you can then move through. This is generally used in combination with other light to build regions of slightly different brightness and color just as you'd find on a forest floor. Even a subtle addition can immediately draw more attention when movement also makes the illumination appear to flow over a person. We also may have a couple of fun gobo shapes to throw onto the cyc above and behind you (in addition or in contrast with the cyc color), to suggest an environment or a situation. Fire, ivy leaves, castles, rocks, stars, etc -- some of them frankly look kind of hokey, but if that sort of thing sounds desireable we may have something. A few more background effects may be available using programmable robotic lights; see below. * Emphasis is brought about by spotlights with human operators behind them. These follow you around when you move, providing not only more light but in a bright, attention-getting circle around you. Spots can also be used for particular mood effects -- one used alone, for example, is sort of harsh and brittle in the same way a camera flash is, with sharp shadows, but one or two used against all the other light is often the perfect "punch-up" your costume wants. They also bring out more sparkle in glittery things like sequins or metallic fiber. Spots are best used in very light tints, a slight cool or pink or lavender which also flatters most flesh tones. Deep colors are available in a spot but they tend to dim it out from that far back, and aren't really useful unless you're trying for a particular effect. For example, spots sometimes get used to suggest moons and planets on the cyc instead of lighting people. * Front light fills in the rest of the picture, and is what finally makes the costume really visible. This is called the "main wash", and is where the warm and cool moods come into play which can slightly shift the colors people see. The front light can be toned in various ways that affect how parts of a costume may look and not others, and in subtle ways -- for example, adding a little deeper red on that mostly-black ninja costume will change the fleshtone a little but make the red sash you're wearing jump right off the stage at the viewer. The front light we use already contains a broad mix of colors and even with the most neutral "fred" we can produce isn't necessarily a flat white, so that's where we strive for a subjective "better" to optimize it. That's the major reason we'd appreciate having at least a sample of the actual costume at the rehearsal, to know in advance what will work best for your colors. Getting this wrong carries the risk of making your costume look flat and lifeless, but if we have the opportunity to see it in advance and get it right it can make all the difference. In general, theatrical type lighting tends to de-emphasize the green a little bit. Green tends to not look good on people, despite its being the band of color that our vision is most sensitive to! But if there's some particular alien look that you're striving for, we can possibly arrange to put more green back into the mix. This often depends on how the rig is designed. * Some lighting rigs will include computer-controlled instruments that we fondly call "wiggle lights" -- because they can move around and change color and have spinning shapes and the like. These play a large role in a club- dance environment, of course, but can also be used more theatrically or to produce effects that our ordinary lights can't. We'll try to run a quick demo of some of the available fun stuff if there's time. They can also be used like strobes since they are able to turn on and off very fast. The colors that wiggle-lights produce tend to be much more saturated and some of them are positively gross, but perhaps that's good for a particular effect? The big rehearsal caveat about moving lights is that they take much longer to program than the regular lights. Unfortunately time doesn't always allow extensive work in this area, but we may have one of several "pre-canned" looks and combinations you might like to use. Hopefully this tells you about the fairly large palette of lighting components and effects available to you. Heck, we've even got a mirror-ball, for that "disco vampire dance" surprise entry someone will invaribly do, and a couple of other fun things that can vary year to year and con to con. But we always try to have the basics in place and be ready to help you dazzle 'em with brilliance. To sum up -- the more that tech learns about not only your costume and its colors, but also the place, time of day, mood, and how you'd like to run your entry and exit and any changes in the middle, the better the whole production will become. This file is also http://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/lighting/masq-fx.txt if you want to pass the URL around among the costuming community. _H* v2.03 080116