Sorry about the delay, I really meant to post this on Saturday, but I have been down with the plague or somesuch.
Like the song says: Three is a magic number...
So, I will
advance my notion with an exercise that will have your colleagues questioning your continued mental health... yay.
Stand at the T and
face the audience...
Light #1:
Put your
right arm straight out in front of you and
point, now move it to the right until it is at approximately 45deg. out from an imaginary plane generated by your spine and sternum.
Now move your arm up to 45deg. from the plane of the
stage.
Where your
hand is pointing is where I'd put the
Key light.
In our *perfect*
universe there is a *perfectly* placed pipe 40 feet distant to hang our 1K 8"
fresnel Key, fully flooded, with a L229 in the slot to take a *little* harshness off of the nasal break
line.
Light #2:
Repeat tricky waving about steps above with your left arm...
Where your left arm is pointing is where I'd put the
Fill light.
On the same pipe used by the Key we'd hang a 750W 6" or 8"
fresnel Fill, fully flooded, with a L229 (or two, probably two...definately two) in the slot to make the shoulder
line less uh... less.
Light #3:
Lower your arms and get the blood flowing again with a good 180deg. about-face (your back is now to the audience).
Raise your pointing
right arm to 60deg. up from the plane of the
stage and out about 20 deg from the bisecting plane of your body.
Where your
hand is pointing is where I'd hang the Hair light.
In our *perfect*
universe there is a *perfectly* placed pipe 30 feet distant to hang our 350W 3" or 5"
fresnel, fully flooded.
The position of the top
barn door can be important, but our imaginary space has a *perfect*
teaser right in front of our imaginary pipe...
So, let's put the talent on the T and lets look at what we have here...
The two front lights have enough luminous difference to generate good depth-establishing shadows, but not so severe that they appear un-natural.
Interestingly, even when the subject turns their head, the
effect is not objectionable to the observer.
The key has enough overall
intensity to provide good "eye-sparkle" to the majority of the observers and overpowers the fill enough to make the brain feel that
the light source is coming from the
house left.
The fill is adequate to prevent a noir type of feeling and is where you could
gel with surprise pink or the like to make pasty talent look more fleshy... or other colors to taste, or not. If we add a
gel we pull one of the L229s...
The L229s soften this whole thing slightly if it is to be an outdoor scene, omit them except for one in the fill.
The
intensity of the hair light will vary depending on the color of the talent's hair.
It provides good talent separation from the background stuff and makes the whole set feel less like a painting and more lively.
Also by not having it be directly behind the talent the small shadows it will make will be not in a nearly parallel
line with most costuming
etc.
Once you have the balance correct the talent will "pop" and if you
track the ratios, it will dim to about 20% and still be effective.
The real magic is the use of Fresnels... Cut carefully with barn doors and/or
blackwrap you can make a reasonably large area where this "special" lighting works well... like a rectangle 20'W x 8'D on the
stage floor.
Because talent *always* hits the T every single time...
Which leads into the dancer solution, which if we are not doing "lanes" and are doing the whole
stage...
On the same magic pipe... out over the
house where our
current Key and Fill are contentedly lighting away... we'd add additional Keys and fills at the same angles with fringed or pinked
blackwrap on the doors to assist the blends until the width of the
stage was covered...
Then we'd populate pipes up and
downstage with the same
pattern as necessary until the depth of the
stage was covered and cut carefully with the barn doors and then the talent could flit about with depth and character and not look like a
flat watercolor.
We'd probably dispense with the hair lights as the talent will probably be moving in the Z axis relative to the audience and the resulting parallax would remove the need to prove Z dimension to the observer.
Some fidgeting with the intensities will be necessary to compensate for variables associated with human talent...
Ta-dah.