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Let’s continue on Lighting master class day 2, actually the other 2 section left on that day is Brian MacDevitt’s Visual Aids: Paintings and Photography For Inspiration and Communication In The Theatre and Kevin Adams’s The Fine Arts Influence on a Lighting Designer. Both section are focus heavily on looking for inspiration from different art period, photography as their title suggest. Kevin Adam’s design ideas are mostly from modern art that reflect in his lighting design. His innovation ideas in theatrical lighting design such as adding regular light bulb and neon light into the set.
At night we went to see 9 to 5 at the Marriot Marquis Theatre, after the show we stay for a way and had a conversation with the head technician.
Fist section of the last day of BLMC was Emoting and Motion: Communicating With Movement by Peggy Eisenhauer, continue on musical.
She point out a few question that as lighting designer would ask themselves about the affect of motion.
Question 1 is what determines moving light is the appropriate choice? How director see the stage changing, also does time travel? Do we want to change the perspective that audience looking at and what room to integrate for.
Question 2 is what is the attributes or characteristic for motion that suitable place to put in? Such as period in a sentence, language or following objection toward or away ( open / close iris) Counter motion, light on the objection but the object move on one direction and light on the other. Traveling motion
Question 3 are the character as motion, work with them. Does motion take on it own state? What color works with that? What thinking is require in managing?
Orientation: location of pan and tilt in relationship to the space.
Last, how you communicate the image to the program
The next section is  A Case Study “9 to 5″ by Ken Posner, Peter Nigrini and Jules Fisher and the following one is Howell Binkley, Finding Your Path As A Lighting Designer.
The very last section of the lighting master class is by Wendall K. Harrington: Sets, Lights, PROJECTIONS: keeping your focus in the new digital age, which I found very exciting and she address on the core of integrating technology. According to Wendall Harrington, adding projection design is to enlarge audience experience and let them find answer.
There are varieties of projection front and back.
Here are some qualities that she mention
1.     Front project
a.    usually from a distance, uses lenses, embracing
b.    emits lost of light that will eats stage light
c.    When the projection screen is a white surface, forget front light, use side light instead eg. Rag time, time & again, putting it together
d.    Material: black sere, which is so black, thick that image look like hanging on fiber, sucks away
e.    Be mindful of color surface, example like when using blue surface there will be no yellow
2.    Rear
a.    Brighter than front projection
b.    Don’t get the distance as front projection may be as much as 7ft
c.    Black nor RP looks grey in front, not really black-be careful of reflect, hot spot, (how to made it darker?
d.    Material: Bobbinet- eats bounce, really black, scrim with holes that is bigger
Front projection would go through scrim, black scrim with darkening. A white or gray scrim will be so obvious when flying in and out.
Combining front and rear projection gives depth to the stage
Projection is not a physical object that is not tangible, “not there.” It is like a dream, Wendall Harrington said: “do they(audience) need to know where they(performer/audience) are or have the feeling”
At last she point out a upcoming website for projection designers: Projectionconnection.org.

Wendall Harrington is a very energetic person that brings all the attendees’ attention to her speech and let the BLMC end at high spirit.

On the second day of the BLMC, we started with lecture by Peggy Eisenhauer, Musical Cueing: Sculpting, Time, and Rhythm. Again, playing videos of Chicago and dream girl film production.
According to Peggy Esenhauer, in dream girl there is stylistic approaches to timing using restrict color, mostly primary color creates a pattern let audience understand and follow the pattern.
Some key words that she mentioned are accelerating, decelerating, slow motion, time laps,
Her processes in musical cueing are
1)    Listening to director
Get the approach of:
movement of place
transition
watch body language
listing to words (slowly, quickly, immediately, gently, instantly, magically) sooner, faster
2)    Listening to music
a.    Style
b.    Period
Listen without doing anything
Listen to it when you are doing something hard
3)    Shelf rehearsal
rehearsal without anyone
a.    watch who doing
b.    entrances, exists, dance section, impulses
c.    listen to the musical thing
d.    put check for cues, identify cue point
4)    Technical rehearsal
a.    Memorize magic sheet
b.    Timeout the opening section -> be confident of saying “it’s having been time yet” and do time by showing it
Following the process is the difference in timing and style
In convention style cues are placed at
Transition
Different kind of space
Bound up at a number
Lighting happen on the break/ peak of pause

Some other key words that she mentioned are accelerating, decelerating, slow motion, time laps. Peggy Esenhaue emphasis the word rubato, which means expressive tempo that can be slower or faster, music is moving or slowing it down. Another vocabulary is peak moment, by placing a bob?/pop? Bue at 1st down or under beat will connect audience’s mind to the sound they hear and when the see, or holding it back being late to give movement.
She also stress that it is important to know the response time of the equipments such as shutter, start time.
In musical cuing the key is finding the point of impact.
After a short break is Insight from Lighting a Cyclorama by Don Holder. The cyc act as the background, which unify with foreground. It can reflect on the way we see sky, also direct the light to where it to be but not pulling the eye away. Also adding front light, booms and ladders can add make the color on the cyc more even or to add colors on it to create various effect and movements of the light.
Don Holder shared his techniques of lighting a cyc. When lighting flat scenery from front, use linen cloth when there is no bounce. By adding a front light at the balcony on the drop will make it look more even. Another technique is indirect lighting, when there is enough place for bounce and the recommend distance is 3 feet. A bounce is good for even and soft the light, material is bleach mezzanine that is better than natural mezzanine that is much yellower. Furthermore he compare the difference between of muslin and RP screen that the audience would see the source form first one but no the second one.
A scrim in front of the RP can smooth everything, a white screen can give a white vibrant sky and black scrim will cut down the intensity of the light.
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mmm I have a lots of note on the second day, I think I need to separate it into 2 parts, I will upload it as soon as possible ~~~^^

Back from New York City last Saturday after Broadway Lighting and Projection master class. It was definite a great experience, I have learn a lot from the speakers, watching videos of their finished design as well as process also touch and “play” the gears that different company brought to the showcase like the grandMA 2, green Hippo etc.

The Lighting master class took place at the theatre in NYU Skirball Center For The Performing Arts. Before the class started we have breakfast in the hallway downstairs. Since, there were not enough chairs so I sat on the stairs and start talking to the lady sat beside, her name is Michelle she is from Toronto, yeah~ near buffalo haa. She is a lighting designer most often design for modern dance piece.

Around 9 the lecture was about to start, as I came in to the theatre they were playing the water show of cirque du soleil video. The show is in a round theatre in Las Vagas. The theatre has circles over head lighting grid in front of the audience also under water, and all of them are moving lights. The contrast of color and textures on performs as well as the transformable water stage engraves strong images in mind. The movement of the light dance in a circle following and breaking their rhythm made the show amazing. As the video ends we starter our fist lecture by Jules Fisher, An approach to Stage lighting, which divided, into 2 parts. He shared his definition of stage lighting and giving examples especially relate to broadway.

The lecture of approach to stage lighting focus on topics such as human psyche, how people see light, his process of design, theory, aesthetic, and referencing Master art pieces. Jules Fisher showed slides of masterpieces in the history telling us the power of interpretive and ritualistic of theatre. Another topic is dramatic space imagine lighting as a fluid in the 3 dimension space, discuss the 4 quality of light, intensity, color, form and time.

Section in between is Paper-Aided Bean Spreads by Scott Parker. Folding an 8.5 letter size paper, helps quickly finding the right angle and position of instrument in scale. Folded the paper into half, it is 45 degree and fold it again is 22.5 degree that is close the 26 degree. Repeat it again will get close to a 10 degree. When looking through the point of the angle, we can see the spread of the light.

Last section of the day it On color by Beverly Emmons. She showed us the graph of light in relationship to the frequency. An interesting question she brought up is, we have magenta in our swatch book, but where is magenta in the scientific graph? A mannequin was set on at the center of the stage and 2 booms on either side of the stage. Emmons showed us different combination of color, primary, secondary also contrast of colors in pairs. Yellow dominates blue and attract focus, magenta dominates red and cyan over magenta. Furthermore, our eyes always try to balance what we see and looking for white that will affect the color in front of us. For example by adding a green back light will turn white light warmer.

Since there is lots of information, I will separate it in to several posts and share my trip to you and picture coming soon too.