Need help lighting an all white set

Ok, in a nutshell....
I volunteer at a middle school. I direct, make all the costumes, build all the sets, my husband runs the light booth, my daughter runs the spotlight. We have no outside help. Yes, it's a big job.

We are doing R&H Cinderella. I've designed and built all the sets to create a flat white palette. My vision is to create a lovely mood with lighting. I have my ideas but am not sure of gel colors. I want to generally use violet-pink-turquoise-sky blue-amber tones but don't want the actors to look ridiculous. I know zero about lighting but have been pleased with my past several shows.

We have about 120 working ellipsoidals and an amazing brand new Strand system (that no one knows how to use) but we have to borrow a cherry picker to move and add gels to them...so we need to get it right the first time.

Here's what I'm going for http://drama.arts.uci.edu/sites/default/files/woods%205-resized.jpg

My set turned out great, now I need help choosing the proper gel colors.

thanks for any and all advice,
Robyn
www.aviatordrama.com
 
The short lesson on lighting you get from the picture. ....The shadow knows......
Look at the shadows you see faces lit from high angles catwalks In white.
Other walls and set item may be duel hung washes allowing you to shift warmer or cooler.
Crossing with duels in secondary tones will let you create the amber and teals.
In essence everything is RBG. Red and blue make purple, add a touch of green and it will shift to lavender. Take out the red and now your left with teal. You don't need a teal gel to gave a teal set. You're painting with light.

This let's you shift moods easily.
 
Think about lighting the set separately from the actors. A lot of your lights will end being pointed at the walls and that's how you will get color on there. Then you bring up the lights on the actors with no gel or very light colors, so you can have saturated colors behind and around the actors, but they stay in white.
 
As alluded to above, the whole concept hinges on the ability to have a very steep angle on front lighting, including the followspot. Without that angle, spill from the front will wreck the effect. I thinks this effort seceding is dictated by the physical layout of the venue and its ability to support high angles.
 
You can get faces lit more neutraly with side light shuttered off the scenery or from slightly back angles with color from the front. Even with strep front, hard to control bounce.
 
wow, thanks! all of these comments are just what I was hoping for. I should really put more thought into separating the actors from the scenery.
I need to get it right the first time so we don't have to get back up on the cherry picker.

One last question, where can I get the best price for gels? I've bought locally and online but 20x24 still averages around $8 each. Any ideas?

Thanks again,
Robyn
 
ApolloOutlet.com is probably your best bet right now. Prices range from $2.99 to $5.99 per sheet. Our "Colors of the Month" are $2.99. The rest are $3.95, $4.79, or $5.99.
 
Great!! I placed my order at Apollo last night. I have high hopes for this look. It looks fabulous in my head....but my singing sounds fabulous...in my car :)

Thanks for all your help
Robyn
 
ApolloOutlet.com is probably your best bet right now. Prices range from $2.99 to $5.99 per sheet. Our "Colors of the Month" are $2.99. The rest are $3.95, $4.79, or $5.99.
"Color of the month" I love it! Wish those types of deals were happening before I retired!
 
Ok, our show is over, this is a recap.
The lighting plan I devised came out pretty mediocre. I could have used help choosing the colors. I used a spotlight to test with a swatch book...if you recall, I can't get to my ellipsoidals or par cans without a cherry picker. Some colors I chose were deep and some barely noticeable, even though they look the same strength in your hands.
Also, some of the gels I bought were fine, but others melted instantly and we had to scrap them?? I have no idea why, they were the same except for color.

Lesson learned: ask experts before you design a set around grandiose ideas and have your heart set on something.
Thanks for the help!!
 
I am guessing you found a correlation between the darker colors and burnout times. Darker colors (more saturate or saturated) tend to burn quicker, especially blues and purples, as less light is transmitted, and more is absorbed by the media itself. A few tricks -
If you don't need the super dark colors, go with something with a higher transmission. This is displayed in the swatchbook.
A good heat shield (I believe Apollo's Gelshield is second to none) can make a world of difference. Place this between the gel (and diffusion if used) and the instrument. I personally feel the order should go Instrument ----->Heat Shield (In it's own frame) -------> Diffusion (with textured side to the instrument)------> Color (with diffusion and color in the same frame.) I did this for the last show I did, and I used the most saturate color AFAIK: LHT181 (high temperature congo blue) at no more than 80%, and I was able to go the entire 12 performance run with 1 change halfway (could have probably stretched to 8 shows), and the instruments were used almost continually throughout the show. (They were 575 watt S4 19°)
If you can purchase them, I have found a slight difference with the Lee High Temperature Color Gels, but it may be more economic to buy double the apollo color (especially at those AWESOME prices) , and get twice as much color.
If possible, even running the instruments at 80% instead of full will make a difference.
Bench focusing the instrument can help keep the field flat and will prevent the center from becoming a premature failure point.
Gel Extenders/Tophats with Gel Taped on the front also make a huge difference. It might be nice to have a set of these to use once in a while if you have especially dark washes.

Some instruments are simply less efficient (and therefore run hotter), leading to less gel time as well.
 
Wow this is a great response. Exactly what I need, simple info in layman's terms. Yes, the deep blue and deep purples were the ones that melted so quickly.
I will definitely buy from Apollo again because our budget is limited and they had great customer service. But THIS time, I'll carefully consider your advice about regulating the temperature. Changing during a show is not possible so I need to get it right the first time.

Thanks much for the detailed answer.
Robyn
 
In terms of melting gel... Heat shield type things are good but also when you are buying the more saturated colours, you can also look for high temperature (HT) gels. These are more resistant to melting in their own right.

With regards to gel choices... sadly I think the only way you ever really learn what things look like is through experience. I know which colours I like for certain tasks because I work in a busy receiving house and we're swapping gels every day so I get a lot of chance to see how different colours look in a practical scenario. And of course, you see the same colours being used again and again for a particular purpose. But of course... I hope you took photos and made notes of what colours were in shot, for your own reference next time?

Personally I use a incandescent maglite (IE the old type - proper bulb) with a swatchbook to get an idea of how things will look. Although it's very hard to make use of it... with tungsten lamps, the lamp itself, the dimmer level, the gel choice, and the surface being lit - will all affect the colour you see. And sometimes you will be mixing several colours on the surface, too.

How many productions are you doing per year? Perhaps it could be worth you buying gel on the roll, rather than by the sheet. You can store your leftovers - it doesn't go off like milk - and use them in future performances and you will get a much better value for money in the long run. But also being able to be more liberal with your gel cuts means you can try things out a bit more freely. And if you have 120+ lanterns, don't forget to buy a big office guillotine and mark all the different gel frame sizes onto it... it will make your cutting very easy.

I find it ridiculous people are still building venues where the only access to the LX positions is up a cherry picker. If you have any balconies, boxes, pros booms, stage booms, etc that you could hang lights on and access easier... try to start doing it!
 
Yes I've made a tremendous amount of notes, especially gel names and numbers, to avoid making the same mistakes.

A maglite would have been a smarter choice to help me go through the swatch book for color choices. The spotlight was a real pain and I was surprised to see how off my choices were when applied. Definitely keep that in mind from now on.

We do a play in the fall and musical in the spring. I start planning the next show before the cast part of the current show because I need time to figure out what experts devise in a minute. I may buy in rolls when I'm more familiar with colors, especially the pink and flesh tones I've used a few times. I used a lot of green and yellow on "Wind in the Willows" without adding enough pinks and it was a learning experience for sure.

I laughed at your last paragraph...you would be appalled at our arrangement. We have a gorgeous auditorium that seats 360, a large stage for a school (52' wide proscenium) plus an incredible, brand new system but booms, no fly bar or batten bar or background of any kind. No way to hang anything, I mean anything... except maybe from the steel rafters, which I'm trying on my next show. The third row of our lighting was never installed and the 30 lamps are stuck in a closet on a shelf. The company that built the school did not do the auditorium equipment and that person cannot be found...it's only been 3 years??

But as I said in my first sentence of this post, I'm it. And if I'm going to make this work, I think I've found the right group to advise me. I've learned more from here than in all my books and system manual, for sure.

thanks much,
R
 
ind it ridiculous people are still building venues where the only access to the LX positions is up a cherry picker. If you have any balconies, boxes, pros booms, stage booms, etc that you could hang lights on and access easier... try to start doing it!

I agree (though I guess for that reason I thought this was over stage). The resistance to catwalks in design by both school administrators and architects is just amazing. Usually I can make the case (1) they do not have to be very expensive and (2) in all but a very few cases there will be a need to access the fixtures on at least a semi-regular basis and properly designed and constructed catwalks are much safer than any lift, ladder, scaffold, or similar method.
 
My thoughts are the same. I would encourage any new theatre space to include galleries and catwalks... both are as you say the safest way to access fixtures both for servicing and maintenance.

But also I think fixed positions on stage are too frequently overlooked. 2 towers and a bridge on the back of the pros are excellent positions and can incorporate decent access to them and facilities for getting lanterns to the different levels safely. Proper boom trolleys (not just a tank trap job) are excellent for side light too. Yet there still seems to be a wide belief that fixed bars straight to the ceiling - both over stage and the audience - as absolutely ample.

Probably because the installer will never use it, and neither will the accountants.
 

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