Lighting has the ability to help the audience know where and when we are. It has the ability to show time of day, location, whether we are inside or outside, the weather, and all kinds of different circumstances. The designer uses each of the Elements of Light to create a composition which gives visual clues to the audience as to time and place.
The lighting design can inform the audience of:
Here are some examples of how a lighting designer might use the elements of light to help to visually describe the given circumstances:
These 'realistic' given circumstances are not always important, but when they are it is crucial that the lighting designer support this part of the storytelling by making choices that are congruent with the setting.
When lighting designers use the elements of light to help define the given circumstances, we also deal with conventions. An example of a convention is when we create night scenes by bathing the stage in saturated blue light. In reality, light at night is not blue, but the audience accepts this convention as being true. These conventions can be cultural in nature, but they can also be local to the production itself. For instance, imagine a play that moves fluidly back and forth between the present and memory. The designer might make visual choices that make each of these given circumstances distinct, through the use of color (maybe a sepia tone in the memory sections), direction (low angle key lights that create non-realistic shadow), shape (a specific gobo pattern that appears in one section). The last example was used to significant effect in Jo Mielziner's original design for Death of a Salesman. The memory sections included organic patterns that suggested the presence of sunlight through tree branches, while the scenes during the present day used sharper inorganic patterns that suggested that the buildings of the city had overtaken the natural beauty of the place in Willy's memory.
Ultimately, whatever choices you make at the beginning of the play set the help to establish the visual language of the piece, and these rules create the conventions that you follow (or disrupt) later in the piece. Those rules remain in place until the end of the play, and then are redefined for the next play.
The lighting design can inform the audience of:
- Time of Day
- Indoors or outdoors
- What the weather is like
- Whether we are in a realistic or an abstract space
- What the motivating light source is
Here are some examples of how a lighting designer might use the elements of light to help to visually describe the given circumstances:
- By using a leafy breakup gobo (shape) from a high angle (direction), the information is telegraphed that the actors are in an outdoor space, with a light source shining through treetops. Depending on the intensity of the surrounding area, we might sense that the scene is taking place deep in the woods. A change in color from a bright amber to a pale blue might suggest the difference between day (sunlight) and night (moonlight). If the color is then shifted again into something fantastic and non-realistic, maybe a bright pink and green, the audience may then know that while we are in the forest, there might be something supernatural about the setting.
- A light sitting on the floor pointed up (direction) at an actor, with a saturated amber gel (color) with a flicker effect (movement) running, it is clear without much more information that the actor is sitting near an open flame of some sort- if the intensity of the light is very low, then it might be a candle. If it's a bit brighter than that, perhaps it is a campfire. And if it is really bright, perhaps Nero is watching Rome burn, or the production is presenting the fires of hell itself.
These 'realistic' given circumstances are not always important, but when they are it is crucial that the lighting designer support this part of the storytelling by making choices that are congruent with the setting.
When lighting designers use the elements of light to help define the given circumstances, we also deal with conventions. An example of a convention is when we create night scenes by bathing the stage in saturated blue light. In reality, light at night is not blue, but the audience accepts this convention as being true. These conventions can be cultural in nature, but they can also be local to the production itself. For instance, imagine a play that moves fluidly back and forth between the present and memory. The designer might make visual choices that make each of these given circumstances distinct, through the use of color (maybe a sepia tone in the memory sections), direction (low angle key lights that create non-realistic shadow), shape (a specific gobo pattern that appears in one section). The last example was used to significant effect in Jo Mielziner's original design for Death of a Salesman. The memory sections included organic patterns that suggested the presence of sunlight through tree branches, while the scenes during the present day used sharper inorganic patterns that suggested that the buildings of the city had overtaken the natural beauty of the place in Willy's memory.
Ultimately, whatever choices you make at the beginning of the play set the help to establish the visual language of the piece, and these rules create the conventions that you follow (or disrupt) later in the piece. Those rules remain in place until the end of the play, and then are redefined for the next play.