Live Design 09 BLMC day 1

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.