Light Design Theory

For the audience, the difference between a show with strong light design and a show with bad light design is like putting glasses on for the first time. 

Good light design amplifies the clarity of the emotional landscape of the show. Bad light design does not help the audience understand the emotional intent of different moments. Good light design works closely with performers to reflect the emotion they are trying to project. Bad light design can at times go the wrong way and contradict what the performers are trying to convey.

A good light design fades into the background of a show by empowering the audience member to emotionally invest in the emotionality projected by the theatrical composition as a whole.

In essence, good light design is like an invisible hand that guides the audience through the emotional journey of a performance, while bad lighting can disorient or distance the audience from the intended experience.

The easiest way to tell good light design from bad light design is by asking whether rimlight is or is not being used. Roughly 90% of theatrical light designs do not use rimlight. The others are professional light designs. 

Rimlight is primarily for separating the foreground from the background. 90% of the time when you have a main subject that needs good lighting, you need rimlight. This is particularly essential if the background is red (skin tones have a lot of reds). 

Rimlight can also be used by itself to light a figure dramatically without providing good lighting on the front. It can create a beautiful silhouette. 

If you're stuck and can't make something look good, try lighting it from behind instead.

Remember: if you hear yourself saying you don't actually need any rimlight in your entire show because reasons X, Y, and Z, reasons X, Y, and Z are most certainly not good enough reasons to not use rimlight. You need rimlight!

The ratio between the color saturation in a venue's stage architecture and the color saturation in a light design must be controlled to significantly reduce the latter when the former is notable. 

For example, traditional, historical, formal venues with prominent architecture visible on stage are not suitable for strongly colored light designs. This means lighting designers should not light design these venues with armies of color changing LED fixtures and then proceed to actually create many saturated washes.

This is mostly because when a lighting designer makes the decision to wash something with strongly saturated light, they also make the decision to destroy all existing, passive color design.

Let's say you're light designing a musical number with a single soloist accompanied by a band. 

There are two types of light: colored light and neutral light. Knowing when to use each is extremely important. Neutral light is for lighting the main subject 90% of the time. Colored light is for lighting the background 90% of the time. We light our main subject with white, neutral light to direct attention, to preserve skin tones, and to preserve costuming colors. We light our background with colored, saturated light to establish mood and to create visual hierarchy, separation between foreground and background, and mood. 

So in the example, we would light the soloist with white, neutral light so he/she looks good and we would light the band with colored light to create that hierarchy and to set mood. 

Uplights are a great way to create a background for a show if you don't have one already (not for fictional worlds though). Typically on the stage you want to have a strong foreground (typically the proscenium arch), middleground (subject), and background (uplights or a drop). Uplights are for the background. This helps create depth on the stage. They are also very useful for quickly establishing color palettes. But be careful to only ever use 2 different colors on the uplights for a primary look. More on that later.

The general rule of thumb is to only use a maximum of two colors in the color palette for each scene. One is often sufficient. People occasionally say white also counts as a color, but I disagree unless white is being used on uplights or some other effect light. 

Another very important thing to keep in mind while selecting color palettes is the costuming of the main subject(s) of each scene. You typically want the background mood lighting color to either strongly match or strongly contrast the primary costuming color. 

Here are some common color associations in American culture, mostly for use in backgrounds:

Green: Often associated with evil or conversely with life/nature/energy

Red: Often associated with fear and danger

Soft Blue: Often associated with calm

Hard Blue: More associated with energy than with calm

Deep Purple: Often associated with grief, despair, and loss

Unexpected Desaturation: When used properly, this can be associated with grief and loss

Gold: Often associated with success, life, happiness

Note that all of these color associations are generalizations and that certain combinations used well can successfully defy these associations. 

Also, these associations may be different in different cultural contexts.

A motif creates extraordinary meaning out of the utterly innocuous.

A motif is a pattern that is established early in a story that then changes later in the story to indicate something important has changed. 

In light design, you can use the principle of motif to teach the audience a light design language. Teach them patterns. Then, break the pattern to show something has changed. 

In Alva software, the only way to control a light fixture is by first creating a motif strip in the sequencer. In Alva, everything is built entirely out of motif strips. Every primary look should be thought of as a motif. Every effect should be thought of as a motif. Every accent should be thought of as a motif. Motifs are the building blocks of story. They're how we create meaning: the audience learns through recognition of pattern. Motif is a pattern that eventually changes to demonstrate change. Think always in motif. Always think about how each look is related to all other looks. Always think about how each look might change later on to indicate an important relationship is now different. 

If storytelling is like pouring a concrete slab, motif is like rebar. Motif is the glue that makes stories mean something.

Lighting designers tend to go a little crazy with adding gobos just for the sake of adding gobos. 

In my light designs, I stand by the principle that if a typical audience member sees a gobo and wouldn't be able to explain why it's that type of gobo and not a different type of gobo, then the gobo probably isn't serving a clear purpose. 

Now that's when the gobos are in focus. When the gobos are being used to add dimension to a light beam in haze, that's fine. 

I tend to err on the side of too little gobo. If there isn't a clear need for texture or if there isn't a clear need for a very specific pattern on a cyc or other flat surface, we can probably go with nogobo. 

Too much gobo creates visual clutter, confusion, and general distastefulness. Gobos impacting keylight on a primary subject's face without extremely clear purpose is particularly upsetting. I strongly prefer erring on the side of less gobo and not more gobo.

If it is possible to sufficiently light a main subject without a follow-spot, a follow-spot should not be used in 90% of cases. This is because follow-spots are distracting. If a follow-spot simply must be used, it should be diffuse 90% of the time. Harsh spotlights should only be used for very specific reasons, as they are the most distracting. 

Considerable effort should be made in the planning stages of a light design to allow the main subjects to be lit without follow-spots in 90% of scenes. 

Lighting designers sometimes believe that every light design look for each song should be unique compared to all others in the show. 

I disagree. I prefer to string different lighting motifs together throughout a show to create a cohesive structure. Motifs, or repeating patterns, are how humans learn. Repeating patterns in light designs across a show allow audience members to subconsciously learn a light design language. This allows them to connect more deeply with the show. 

A key point of consideration when using this technique is that the light design language absolutely must be employed consistently, or it will become meaningless. 

This is the reason why song lyrics tend to be extremely repetitive.

Busking is a practice where lighting changes for a live show are created on-the-fly in real time using a lighting console.

90% of those who busk live shows shouldn't be. Like learning how to play a new musical instrument, it takes years to develop presentable busking skills. Unlike learning a musical instrument, learning busking does not provide rapid, consistent, and reliable feedback. That is because a musical instrument does not grow, shrink, and transform every new show. Lighting rigs do. That is also because there are no light design teachers teaching busking. Almost all training emphasis is on the technical aspect, not on the artistic design aspect. There are no clear authority figures to say when a light design is good or bad. It's not graded. Therefore, it is extremely difficult for one to improve if they are not surrounded by better designs or if they do not have strong design instincts. Many terrible designers never receive useful feedback and thus cannot improve.

As a result, in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, any show that can be cued should be. 90% of the time, busking the majority of a live show containing significant amounts of music should be avoided at almost all costs. 

This might begin to change if a lighting designer has spent years refining their busking craft in a setting where they receive rapid, consistent, and reliable feedback and where they spend significant periods of time engaging in deliberate practice. 

A foremost goal of Alva is to significantly reduce the technical knowledge needed to put time-coded light designs on the stage. Currently, processes for doing so are very technical and the learning curves are steep. The time gap between idea and execution is often quite lengthy and consists of much technical jargon. The initial phase of Alva is targeted to dramatically reduce that time gap. The best possible case scenario is where a lighting designer imagines an advanced lighting effect and the tool is able to reproduce that advanced effect instantaneously.   

The first-principles goal is to make the gap between human neurons firing and photons in the air as short as possible. Any tool, part, or process that extends that gap gets deleted. Any tool, part, or process that shortens or deletes that gap stays. All parts and processes must serve to shorten or delete the gap. Specifically in the context of time-coded light design, the first step of the process is moving from programming-based control to animation-based control: 

Programming is technical, animation is organic.   

Programming is steps, animation is flow.  

Programming is nuts and bolts, animation is choreography.  

Programming is computers, animations is dancers.  

Programming is syntax, animation is posing.

When timecoding lighting effects for music, most effects will be directly motivated by clear musical elements. This is because lighting choreography tends to highlight and copy the musical patterns. However, more advanced lighting choreography is able to become more like an independent dancer with more creative autonomy. This means that lighting changes can be motivated by less direct sources. Application of both direct and indirect lighting motivation allows lighting choreography to look and feel more like an independent, deeply ingrained member of the creative process. Only using direct motivation sources for lighting motivation is similar to adding an instrument to an orchestra that just copies what another instrument is doing all the time. It can work, and it can work well, especially since lighting is very different from music. However, a more nuanced and independent artistic expression through lighting involves indirect motivation sources as well.

In summary, this means that all lighting beats should not be traceable to an audible musical note. Some should be traceable to an inferred beat.  

Immersive live sound design is when you take an audio mixing console and set it up with an army of speakers in such a way that you can effortlessly make any microphone, any specific track, or any effect come from any location on stage or in the house. This specific design used about 14 different speakers. Some were for animal characters, some were for specific points in the show, and others were in the ceiling above the house. The audio mixer was set up such that every speaker—the mains included—was mixed like a monitor would be, through buses.  

The show incorporated a short film which I later mixed in Dolby Atmos for this show. A Dolby Atmos trailer played before it to prepare the audience for the spatial effects. Dolby Atmos is a spatial audio format that is different from spatial audio formats because it incorporates 2-4 height speakers.

Timecode is the magic sauce that lets stage lights dance on their own to the music. Without timecode, every cue has to be fired manually. With timecode, a programmer can pre-program highly specific cue timings for perfect, effortless reproduction of a light dance every time. This show primary used internal timecode clocks inside eos, but also relied on some time-based cues from Qlab in its timeline editor.

A UCI allows you to jump between many different cues over and over again so you don't have to make dozens and dozens of identical cues. In a nonlinear show—where things tend to jump around a bit—this is super helpful for minimizing clutter and working efficiently. The final UCI for this show had many different special buttons (aside from launching cues) for things like sound effects, commandeering a spot mover to call people out of the crowd, and functionality for shutting down the constant power and navigating between the UCI's for each night. It was designed such that like buttons were always the same color and were always in the same place night to night. 

Because at times, I ran the show alone with no help. Automation allowed the show to constantly get bigger and bigger and bigger without needing to add staff. Automation was also helpful for helping the staff that was there control basic aspects of the technology without my help. 

Imagine the beginning of a police chase scene: 3 kids are sitting in a car right after a drug deal. You hear a police siren behind you. Then you hear it in the video. Then you start seeing the flashing police lights in the video, and then you see that the entire front wall of the theater is flashing blue and red. Wind noises are pumping into the room from above. The entire theater is now flashing red and blue and the chase is at its climax. You feel wind pushing you back. Police sirens are going off loudly behind you the entire time. The sirens get louder. Louder. The wind gets stronger. Stronger. The flashing gets brighter. Brighter. Then, on the screen, the car crashes. Instantly the entire theater turns bright red. The entire house is beet red. Everything has stopped. The screen automatically rolls back up a few feet to get back to the normal aspect ratio. The red lights slowly fade into the next lighting cue, which is much more calming. The hosts come out and explain why drugs and running from cops are both bad.

That's Alva. Animated Lighting, Video and Audio. Every bit of that was achieved during this show for real—except for the wind.

Every last bit of the show except for the Jumbotron camera pan/tilt/zoom. It was programmed such that I could sit in the house during a live show, have no one in the booth, and run the entire technical aspect of the show from my phone while observing audience reactions, sightlines, lighting, and sound levels. This included controlling the audio mixer, screen motor, constant power, and video switcher as well of course. Most of that was automated to simple macro buttons.