Re: Night Lighting
For night lighting, as with all lighting really, the story gets told in the shadows...
By that I mean - for visibility's sake, you're almost always going to have reasonably strong, mostly white light coming from some direction. This is generally considered 'adequate design.' To take it the next step to 'good' or even 'great design' you need to think about all the other directions...what fills the shadows? If you're stuck with general areas of mostly white light because of the competition
plot (I haven't read your specific competition rules) I would do one of two things...
1. Figure out which set of them to turn on to give visibility and define this set of lights as the direction of 'moonlight.' If they're to really have no
gel at all, then you want to run them at or near full
intensity so the lamp's
color temperature is as cool as possible. You want to turn on no more of them than you need to light the areas people stand in. Then you want to
wash the other side of every actor, and as much of the floor as possible, with a warm blue, to tell everyone, through the shadows, that it's night time. Why, and what warm blue? There are a lot of colors to look at, but I'd consider
Gam 882, or 842... By warm blue I mean a blue with quite a
bit of red transmission and relatively little green transmission. Why? Because your 'moonlight color is NC, which has a lot of warm tones to it and you want the blue light that's filling the other side to seem related to the white light, as if it's the
reflection of that white light bouncing off objects. A really cold (lots of green) blue will fight against the warm light and wind up just looking green. You have to resign yourself to not getting the really gorgeous deep nights you might go after if you could
gel an entire
system of lights with deep blues or lavenders like R82... And even R68 is probably too deep to
play well with the white lights. The big secret is going to be finding a color for the four specials you can use that is blue enough to say 'night time' without looking strange, or being lost against the white lights that are providing most of your light.
2. The other approach is to dim the white lights way down and let them amber
shift to look VERY warm, and
lay this in at a bare minimum
level over deep warm blues, like R82 or G850... This will give you a much darker night, and the white area lights, now, in comparison to the deep blues, looking very amber will give the impression of streetlight, or firelight, or something else 'unnatural' to the scene casting a warm glow over the otherwise very dark night.
There are other ways to accomplish night without a lot of gelled lights, but these are two of my favorites. I hope they help!
Art