1. What do you feel makes a good
Lighting Designer?
A) Someone who takes the time to think the show through and choose the right tool, instead of lazily throwing anything up there. I'll give an example-- while I was an M.E. for a show, it was determined that a couple upstage right needed to be lit in their own special. The
Lighting Designer at the time is someone who I would deem a poor
lighting designer. She looked at her
plot, realized she had a VL 2500 in the center of the
first electric, dialed it up, spun it around on them, and voila! They were now in a special. Problem fixed! Except that by doing so they were lit with a very poor
CRI of the
metal halide lamp (in comparrison to the
Halogen 100%
CRI of the Source Fours used for the rest of the front specials/frontlight., and the angle (being that the
fixture was fixed in place) caused light to
spill all over the
leg behind them. This was sloppy and amatuerish. A GOOD
lighting Designer would have picked the right
fixture hung from the right position with the right
gel to meet the needs of the production better-- whatever those were. But they would have taken the time to put some thought into it.
A good LD can also do a lot with a little. One of the best designs I ever saw was a show at Siam Satire, in Ireland. The variety of lighting from piece to piece was astounding, each perfect for the piece and moment-- and then when you looked up and realized the designer did it all with nothing more than
Altman 360Qs, some 6" fresnels, and some PARcans. Now that is an amazing designer.
No color scrollers, no movers. It's like painting the mona Lisa and only having 1 brush and 3 colors of paint available.
2. Who is your favorite
Lighting Designer?
Price Johnston, Professor of Lighting at CSU. The man is a brilliant designer and a pleasure to work with.
3. What is your preferred method of Lighting Design?
Too vague of a question. Do you mean
McCandless vs Jewel,
etc. or something else entirely?
4. What Lighting Design computer program do you think is the best?[/QUOTE]
It's been a while. I was keen on
Vectorworks with the plug-in at the time though. But now that is so far behind the times I can't really comment.