Chapter 12

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Chapter 12 Image Makers Designers (Lighting,
Sound, and Technical Production)

• I feel that light is like music. In some
  abstract, emotional, cerebral, nonliterary way,
  it makes us feel, it makes us see, it makes us
  think, all without knowing exactly how and why.
• Jennifer Tipton

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Chapter Summary

• In todays theatre, lighting, sound, and computer
  technologies affect what we see, how we see, how
  we hear, how we feel, and often what we
  understand.
• As areas of theatrical design, lighting and
  sound, along with the new machines, are
  essential to the modern stages theatrical
  effectiveness.

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Lighting Design Background

• Ancient Greece
• Torches, fires, sunlight
• Medieval Europe
• Torches, cauldrons of flame and smoke, reflecting
  metals (outdoor)
• Oil lamps, candles, reflecting glass (indoor)
• Renaissance
• Candles, oil lamps, panes of colored glass
  illuminated from behind, colored lanterns,
  transparent cloth veils, fireworks

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Lighting Design Background

• English theatre
• Onstage candles (lit before play, snuffed at end)
• Chandeliers lit start to finish
• Footlights (c. 1672)
• Argand (patent) oil lamps (c. 1785)
• Replaced candles

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Lighting Design Background

• Gas (c. 1850)
• Replaced oil
• Limelight (prototype of spotlight)
• Operated by technician at gas table
• Drawbacks
• Fumes
• Heat
• Live flame onstage

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Lighting Design Background

• Incandescent lamp (1879)
• Replaced gas lights
• Advantages
• Not a fire risk
• Allowed for lightening and darkening different
  areas of stage
• Provided source of mood
• Allowed for different colors
• Londons Savoy Theatre first to be fully lit with
  electricity (1881)

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Lighting Design Background

• Adolphe Appia
• First modern lighting designer
• Argued for light as the guiding principle of all
  design
• Established standards for lighting practices
• Believed light could unify all production
  elements
• Defined role of modern lighting designer

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The Art of Light

• Light designers tools
• Form
• Shape of light pattern

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The Art of Light

• Light designers tools
• Form
• Color
• Mood achieved by filters (thin, transparent
  sheets of colored plastic, gelatin, or glass) or
  by varying degrees of intensity

Courtesy Will Owens/ PlayMakers Repertory Company
Death of a Salesman, with Lighting by Mary
Louise Geiger
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The Art of Light

• Light designers tools
• Form
• Color
• Movement
• Changes in form and color using dimmers,
  motorized instruments, and computerized control
  consoles

Courtesy of High End Systems
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The Designers Process

• Read script
• Note visual images, practicals (lamps,
  chandeliers, etc.)
• Meet with director and designers
• Work out basic questions about lighting
• Create a design
• Light plot

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The Designers Process Light Plot and Focusing

• Light plot
• Map of lighting instruments
• Location of each instrument to be used
• Type of instrument, wattage, color filter
• General area to be lighted by each instrument
• Circuitry needed to operate instruments
• Focusing
• Lights pointed toward area they will illuminate

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The Designers Process Cueing

• Operators provided with cue sheet
• Chart of control console showing instrument
  settings and color
• Each cue numbered and keyed to script
• Designer and operators fine tune intensities,
  colors
• Each change marked on cue sheet
• Some shows use computer-programmed cues.

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Special Lighting Effects

• Lighting effects
• Mirror balls
• Searchlights
• Projections
• Holograms
• Fireworks
• Gobos
• Slide inserted into gate of spotlight to project
  images

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The Designers Assistants

• Assistant designer
• Helps prepare light plots
• Compiles instrument schedules
• Acts as liaison with technicians
• Locates special equipment
• Master electrician
• Oversees safety issues
• Maintains equipment, checks before performance
• Lighting crew
• Installs, operates, maintains all lighting
  equipment

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Theatrical Sound Background

• Earliest theatre
• Music
• Choral chanting
• Actors voices
• Elizabethan theatre
• Thunder machines (series of troughs for
  cannonballs to rumble down)
• Thundersheets (sheets of tin that made a rumbling
  sound when rattled)
• Thunder runs (sloping wooden troughs for rolling
  cannonballs down)

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Theatrical Sound Background

• Since 1900
• Telephone, doorbell ringers
• Door slammer
• Since 1970s
• Audio recording, playback technologies, sound
  systems
• Microphones, amplification

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Uses of Live and Recorded Sounds

• Sound
• Foghorn
• Hourly chime
• Birds
• Rain, thunder
• Toilet flushing
• Scream, howling wind,creaking floorboard
• Telephone, door knock

• Helps establish
• Setting
• Time of day
• Season
• Weather conditions
• Realism
• Mood
• Onstage cues

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Music

• Functions
• Evokes mood
• Establishes period
• Heightens tension
• Intensifies action
• Provides transitions between scenes and at
  endings
• Implementation in production managed by sound
  designer

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The Sound Designer Process

• Reads script, makes note of cues
• Meets with director, designers, composer
• Researches sound libraries, records sounds, music
• Prepares sound track
• Plots effects/music on cue sheet

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Special Effects with Sound

• Function of special effects
• Capture audiences attention
• Increase emotional impact
• Examples
• Offstage noise (e.g., car door slam)
• Recorded music (e.g., to underscore emotional
  scene)
• Aids in telling story, reinforces intended impact
  of scene

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Computer-Aided Design

• Computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided
  manufacture (CAM)
• Help designers configure space virtually
• Allows for preview, change of designs before
  manufacture
• Access to virtual libraries
• Allows for virtual design meetings

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Technical Production Team

• Production manager (PM)
• Coordinates staffing, scheduling, budgeting for
  every element of production
• Technical director (TD)
• Manages scene shop, construction and operation of
  scenery, stage machinery
• Costume shop manager
• Manages costume inventory and budgets, buying
  fabrics, building, buying, and/or renting
  costumes and accessories

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Technical Production Team

• Production stage manager (PSM)
• Coordinates the directors work in rehearsals
  with the actors and the technical departments
• During show, responsible for running entire
  onstage and backstage operation
• Assistant stage manager (ASM)
• Responsible for the smooth operation of technical
  systems and actors exits, entrances, and costume
  changes.

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Core Concepts

• All design elements in the theatre serve the play
  and enhance the storytelling quality of the
  theatre.
• In collaboration with the director, designers (in
  tandem with actors) transform the empty space
  into the living world of the production.
• The theatres production and stage managers,
  along with the many technicians, provide the
  technical support system without which no theatre
  can open its doors.