Lighting the Set : Techniques and Effects

The basics of Lighting

Once the sets have been designed and built and are onstage, the next step is the light-
ing. Often this is one area where little time is spent to create the final mood. Months may have been devoted to building the set, but the lighting is often an afterthought and the process rushed through. Lighting is like the paint that is applied to a new car off the assembly line. No one wants a vehicle that isn’t finished (without paint), and that “paint” is the signature that completes the vehicle. You are essentially doing the same thing when lighting your set.You are adding the last coat of paint to the scene and creating the final product.
Lighting not only illuminates the set but also allows you to create a mood, time, setting,
and look for your environment. Carefully placed lighting units will highlight certain
aspects of your set, and no lighting in other places will hide defects. Once again, your
goal is not just to turn on a light so that the audience may see the action, but to care-fully place each unit to establish the time of day, whether it’s an interior or exterior location, and the mood of the piece.


Three-Point Lighting

As the name implies, three-point lighting is made up of three lights: a key light, fill light, and backlight. This is how people have been lighting for ages. With three-point lighting, the person or object has depth within a space.When looking at a photograph, a two-dimensional object, it is sometimes difficult to separate the subject from the background. The same concept applies on a set. By using lighting and creating depth in your three-dimensional space, objects stand out from the background and look three-dimensional.This is accomplished by modeling the object with your light and “placing shadows” so that your characters or sets do not look flat. Anyone can just point a light at something and blast it. Yes, you have illuminated it, but you have not lit it. Flooding the area with light makes things easier to see, but they are flat, lifeless, and dull. But with three-point lighting, you as the creator are chiseling the object out of darkness, much like a sculptor creates a statue from a block of marble. Think of yourself as that sculptor and your set the block of marble—now sculpt. The key light gets its name because it is the main light providing illumination on your subject or set.The key light is used in theatre, film, and still photography. It is the main (key) light that is the starting point in your lighting setup. The key light is usually not pointing directly in front of the object—let’s say your set. Why? If you point a light at a set wall rising four feet from the stage floor, the wall is now lit, but it is flatly lit—it has no dimension or depth. When you point a flashlight at a wall, you have a bright spot where the beam hits, but that’s all. We talk about spotlights in the next section, and they do precisely what you have just done with your key light—allow the spotlight to blast light on something—but we have better purposes for the key light.

Learning What to Light and What Not to Light

With all of these lighting implements at your control, it is often hard to determine what the best approach to take is and when. In this section, we discuss some more nuances of lighting to make the audience look exactly where you want them to, make them feel a specific mood at a certain time, and, like in a movie, make them identify with the character.
Any light onstage that the audience sees is called a practical. It may be a desk lamp, a
table tamp, a chandelier, a Christmas tree, or even a candle. Anything on the set that
normally gives off some type of illumination is a practical light.To make each of these appear more realistic, one of the cast or crew should turn them on during the scene. Of course, under the bright lights of the set, a single candle is not going to illuminate much of anything, but with your lighting skills, you can make the audience believe it does.
The first example we will work with is a candle. We have used A Christmas Carol
throughout this chapter, so let’s not change midstream. This Dickens play is a great
example to use for lighting because it is a period piece, there are many moods and
lighting types, there are characters that are invisible, and the play takes place in every-
thing from moonlit bedrooms to cemeteries.

How to Create the Intended Effects with Light


The first step in lighting your space is to carve out your set from the void or noth-
ingness. Again, you have been asked to chisel your intended sculpture from a hunk of rock.
Using A Christmas Carol, the same play we discussed in Chapter 9, we are going to let
light set up our boundaries.The empty stage is our workplace.With just four items on
our interior living room set (a fireplace, a Christmas tree, a chandelier, and a padded
stool) we have to make the audience believe we are in Bob Cratchit’s living room (even
though the exterior street set is directly behind). The first step is to turn off all of the illumination on the other background set. It will
still exist in the space, but because it is dark the audience will focus their attention on
what is illuminated.


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