Lighting Fundamentals — From Plug to Pixel

Welcome to the wonderful world of lighting. Now the discussion about lighting in theatre to be honest is quite a long one and we're going to try and dive into some of the concepts around the basic components of that in this lighting 101 section which is just our base layer of lighting. There's other elements we'll talk about which is design and about drafting but we're going to get to those in later sections of lighting. This is predominantly around the terminology understanding what the lights are, what they do and the benefits of what we're talking about. We're also going to be talking about some positions in theatre so there's five or six main positions that you'll always need and use and we're going to talk about those while we're here at the theatre today.

But of course as with all things lighting it's it's one of those things in designing lighting that's completely subjective and is up to the designer to decide what they want to do. Is it a bright show? Is it a musical? Is it a dark show? Is it moody? Is it backlit? Is it side lit? What are those elements in the design from a creative aspect and we then translate the images and plans that the lighting designers produce into actually getting it ready on stage. So before we talk about any of those things I want to give you a basic overview of what them three or four main types of lights are in the theatre and what they do because they're the base concepts that we're going to need to understand moving forward and from there we can start to talk about all of the other attributes.

I'll also go up and focus some lights on the front of House Bridge so you can get a point of view of me behind the light operating it in a different scenario to just here on stage and that will hopefully give you a bit of an understanding about how I have designed lighting and how I work with lighting even as basic as setting up a stage wash for a school or making sure that everyone is lit. The key to remember about lighting is that you're lighting the action. It's not an opportunity predominantly it's not an opportunity to have a massive light show with all the bling it's about making sure that we're drawing the audience's attention into the correct part of the story but in order to do that we need to understand a little bit about how this works.

So I've brought in a lighting bar here and we're going to talk about a couple of the main features that we have on this lighting bar because these are the three main types of fixtures that we're going to be working with predominantly around the world and in today's age we're moving more and more into having what's called LEDs which are your digital lights and we also have moving lights which we don't have here today but that's another level of complexity again but we need to think about the basics first and foremost and the first side I want to talk about is the profile. The profile is as the name suggests a long cylindrical light that has a huge range of features and has a very specific task. It is the light that is predominantly used because it has the most control over what the light and the beam are doing.

It's a long cylindrical light there is a lamp in the back of the fixture and if I take a moment to open one of these up and show you what happens there is a lamp that sits in the back of the fixture like this in its lamp base and that goes into the base of the light into what is called a reflector. Now that reflector takes the light from the globe and it bounces it around in a specifically designed lens and it shoots the light out the front. Now the light that comes out of a profile is what's called tungsten it's what we call 3200 Kelvin is its color temperature and it's the tungsten glow that you see in theaters and has that traditional warm theatrical light output and profiles and the other light we're going to talk about in a moment fresnels a lamp based light and that's what they do they output that nice tungsten glow and we'll talk about how we get all that sorted from the other end of the cable in a moment.

But the profile is controlled by four shutters that you can see here and we'll show you that on the psyche in a moment it has a lens tube which is at the front here which can become hard or soft edged and it gives you a lot of control because these lens tubes are interchangeable and they're interchangeable by way of a degree the angle of the lenses inside here allow you to change broaden or sharpen your image and they go from 5 degrees all the way up to 90 degrees in a number of different increments 5 10 14 19 26 36 50 70 and 90. So this is the workhorse it's called a source 4 there are a number of other profiles out there in the market such as specifics, silicons, we've got comars, we've got cantatas, there's a number of profiles out there but the the main workhorse of the entertainment industry is the source 4 profile and so we're going to look at that in a moment on the psyche. The second fixture that we're going to look at is the Fresnel and the Fresnel is as you can see here a wash light and it's much softer on the ground unlike a profile which gives you much more control the Fresnel gives you only mild control by its barn doors unlike the Fresnel unlike the profile sorry which is long the Fresnel has an internal lamp and a front lens and it'll be easy to show you that when we're looking at the psyche in a moment because this is a bit hot to touch now because it's been on for a while but these elements at the front are called barn doors and you'll see that whilst we get some control on the floor over what the barn doors are controlling we don't have any ability to have a sharp edge so traditionally in school in school teaching for drama students we talk about having a wash of light or a pool of light and that's produced by Fresnel and we talk about having a special or a you know a special or a sharper area of light that's generally produced by a profile.

The other element in the mix these days are LEDs now in days gone by if operas, ballets and theater shows wanted multiple colors profiles and Fresnel's give you the option to slot in a piece of gel which is a colored filter you get one color per light and if you really fancy sometimes you do what's called a split gel and have a blend of colors but if you wanted to have a full stage of red wash you would need to have a full stage of Fresnel's with their red gel if you then wanted to have a blue stage of wash you'd need to have an entire different set of Fresnel's with a blue gel same for green same for amber you'd need to have a lot more fixtures what happens with LEDs these days is that they are a Fresnel equivalent they are a wash light but they are controlled by what's called DMX and they produce an entire color array from the one light so instead of having 24 36 48 different lights to do your different color washes you can now have 12 lights controllable by a smarter console and that enables you to have any color under the Sun. I say any color you can't have black you can't have gold you can't have brown but you know what I mean it gives you a lot more opportunity and an LED is the equivalent of a Fresnel it's got these individual diodes and I'll spin this way so I can show you this camera so individual diodes on the face of the light which all have red green blue cells in them and that enables you to mix the color as you need to to make that color choice so what we do now is we'll turn some lights on to the psych and we will show you that on the on the back wall so that it makes more sense of what we're trying to achieve be right back. So as you can see here by turning on our profile and our Fresnel straightaway we can see looking at the psych the difference in the output of these fixtures the profile is far more controllable and far sharper than the Fresnel and the Fresnel really is a a real soft and gentle wash.

Now the Fresnel on the right hand side here which I'll show you gives does give us some level of control by way of its zoom we can spot the Fresnel as you can see now this is what we call fully spotted and we can flood the Fresnel and what happens on the inside of the light is we're moving the physical lamp and reflector assembly closer to and further away from the front lens and so that gives us our options there with our wash and what happens when we add a colored filter to that Fresnel is that we are able to do our color wash in a single color now you'll notice what I was talking about before with our warm tungsten color that's our this is our what we call our warm basic tungsten if I was to add a color wash in front of this you can see that with this piece of red gel I get a really nice soft red pool of light or a wash of light and again that can be used to light up the floor you can be used to light up the side can keep you so light up different pieces of set. So before that gets too hot I'm just going to remove that because with with lamp to fixtures the downside is that they get really hot and heat is a serious consideration because energy is output by heat and these are literally globes as you would find in your normal household light they're a light bulb but they're they're running at about 750 watts in the case of the Fresnel they're running at a thousand watts so once you start to add 12, 24, 36 lights on at a time they're all outputting a lot of heat by that energy. The profiles you can see as I mentioned before is controlled by shutters so the advantage of the profile is I can really have really fine-tuned control over whatever it is I'm trying to do am I trying to cut the light off of a set piece am I trying to make a certain shape or a or a triangle for an effect a keyhole in the doorway whatever it might be we have the control with the internal shutters but I also have a little bit of soft and hard control here as well.

Now when I add the red gel into this, similarly to the Fresnel I can also color a profile however the problem is I'm limited to one color at a time so the same problem exists when it comes to profiles and Fresnel is compared to LEDs. The advantage now is that Source 4 has and and other manufacturers, Chauvet, professional and other lighting manufacturers now have LED versions of the profile. The profile being the most necessary light in theater in my opinion to control and have its different purposes now being LED means I can have one light in one position and it can do every color so it really opens up my opportunities as a lighting designer because whereas in the past I would have had to have five or six lights in the same position to do different colors warm and cool washes now I can reduce my number of fixtures and just dial in the color I need from the lighting console.

So that's the main difference between our profile and our Fresnel. It gives us control and whilst the barn doors on a profile, sorry the barn doors on a Fresnel give us some degree of control we're always going to be limited by the hard and soft edge variation of the two fixer types and you can see by adjusting the lens tube position in here I can get a really sharp crisp shape on there. Now the other element of a profile which I can demonstrate is by use by the addition of what's called a gobo. Now a gobo for those at home looks like this I'm not sure if you can see that with the light setting we have at the moment but it is a metal disc with a pattern in it and it literally slots inside the profiles or we call the profiles gate I'll just put this in and what that does is it allows us to have certain patterns.

Now in this instance this is what we call a medium breakup or a decal and this gobo pattern is of a leaf design so when the lights are all focused you could have a stage full of leaf texture really great for dance ballet all that sort of thing it breaks up the wash and makes a lot more subtle and dappled the dappled light effect that a lot of people need. The benefit of using moving lights and other lights today is that they come pre-built with many gobos in them but again the traditional profile can take one gobo if needed and one color. Now there are options and different attachments you can get for profiles such as gobos rotators so you can have a little bit of movement and sometimes you can get what's called a color changer which is a whole reel of gel but these days with LEDs they are unfortunately mostly a thing of the past not many people use those elements anymore but this just goes to show you what the power of a profile again I can use my shutters here to trim down the the size and shape of my decal and it allows me to just have that and I can just pull that out again when I'm finished with it and restore it back to being a standard profile.

The third attachment I want to show you here is what's called an iris. Now if you imagine the traditional James Bond opening sequence with the closing frame around him that's called an iris. By putting that iris in the profile it gives me a little bit more control over the size. Now as we've spoken about I can change the hard or the soft edge but the iris now allows me to change the physical what we call the aperture of the spot. Now if I make that sharp we'll be able to see by dragging my iris around in the true James Bond style it gives me the opportunity to go big and small and again I can have my go-bo in there as well I can have my shutters you know I can have a small area and use my shutters and my movement to have a smaller shape it just is another tool in the theatrical arsenal in the lighting department that gives me options with my profile.

So they are the two work horses of theatre the profile and the Fresnel and what we'll do next is I'll ask Matt to turn off the profile please if we may and we'll see if we can turn on this LED next to us. So I've just asked Matt to turn on our LED now to show you the difference between the LED and the Fresnel. Now as you can see the LED on the left hand side is a lot bluer and a lot cooler and that's due to the LEDs inside it. Now we do have the ability with an LED fixture to change its color but before we change the color I just wanted to show you the equivalent of the soft wash that you get between a Fresnel and an LED.

Now this LED is a wash fixture it has been made to be you know equivalent to having a whole rig of Fresnel in the sky and as I mentioned you can also get LED profiles now. So our two main work horses of Fresnel and profile really have been upgraded with the LED. Now Matt if you're able to dial in this LED to be as close to tungsten as we can or what we call CTO. CTO is the warm white the color correction that we get with LEDs and as you can see we have the ability to really sort of fine-tune that looks good there for the minute. We have the ability to really fine-tune what that color looks like and as you can see on the white we've been able to mix the colors within the LED fixture to somewhat replicate the warmth of the Fresnel itself.

There are some LEDs that come as LED equivalents directly of that warm tungsten glow but in this instance we're mixing an RGB a red-green-blue fixture to be equivalent. Now Matt if you could put that LED into red for me please I'm just going to add the red gel back to our Fresnel and just have a look at the at the difference here between the two. Now as you can see with the red of the Fresnel we do lose a little bit of intensity because as the science of light dictates as you add a filter we're absorbing the colors that we don't want so as a result of absorbing those colors we are losing some of that intensity but the benefit of LEDs is that we can get the full intensity of the LED chip and that means we can get a full-stage wash of these colors in their true primary color and the benefit being with LEDs you can then mix any color in the color spectrum because it's now a digital controllable component of the lighting rig and so that's a little bit about the the the difference between Fresnel's and LEDs and profiles these are the three main workhorses that you're going to see within 90% of the theater world and then from here we get progressively more and more intelligent with the lights we have profiles that are moving lights and can move we have Fresnel's that are washes that can move we have control over all the different attributes gobos, irises all those elements become part of our of our toolkit within the lighting rig but we have to understand the concept of profile versus Fresnel as a starting point and I think we've done that here so we're now going to move on to talk about some of the positions in the theater and why they are important as well

So now that we've talked about the basic concepts of profiles, Fresnel, and LEDs, we've talked about the positions in the theatre. Now we need to talk a little bit about how it all works, and how we plug it in to get a light working on the bar in the right position with the right information to match up with our director or designers plans and have that correlate to the lighting console. There's a number of steps in between and this is where our brains need to switch from design and creative to a bit more mathematical and formulated because we need to think about numbers and structure. There's a number of different things we need to think about.

We need to think about something called the channel number, we need to think about something called the patch number, and we need to think about something called the dimmer number. Now the three of them are all linked and correlated but can be looked at in different ways depending on what the designer wants to do. So by way of an example, we're going to start by plugging in this light on the bar. How on earth do I get power to come out of this PowerPoint for this light, controllable by someone sitting way up in the back of the theatre? Well, let's talk about that. The first thing we need to do is obviously hang our fixture on the bar.

Our light is hung here and we take our socket and we plug it into the nearest patch outlet. And this example, we're patched into S89. So we'll write that one down, we're going to come back to that in a moment. All along this bar are patch outlets 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94. On the next bar will be 100, 130. On the next bar, out the front will be 1 to 50. On the side bars might be 72 to 87. The numbers of the patch outlets will always vary depending on the theatre. We've got patch outlets in the floor, patch outlets in the orchestra pit, under the stage, patch outlets on the bars, they're all over. So we take note of our patch number S89.

Generally, when we hang a lighting bar, we will be writing all of this down and you can access that via my lighting patch sheet, which is in your resources folder, and you can start to use one of those as your own. So you write down what the fixture is. In this case, it's a profile with a go-bo for my deco wash and I've patched it into S89. So now we're going to follow the path of electricity from S89 and go backwards all the way through back to our dimmer room. So plugged into the end of this bar is what we call a wheel-end. Now, sometimes you might be using a wheel-end, which is the square plug. Sometimes you might be using what's called a soccer-pex.

Sometimes it might be hardwired in via an electrician to the end of the bar. The reason we often have disconnection options is sometimes these bars might not want to be here. We might want to swing them upstage or downstage. And so it's good to have that disconnection. The other thing we have on here, which we'll talk about in a moment, is DMX. We have two streams of DMX on here, and we need DMX to control things like LEDs and moving lights. But that aside, we're just going to focus on our power. So these wheel-ends, one at this end and one down the other end, are long 50-meter cables that run all the way up to the grid, all the way across, and all come down the wall again.

In here are 8-12 circuits. Now, a circuit is one of these. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 can all travel down one cable. Think of it as 8-12 extension leads all in one cable. It allows us to run one cable down and have multiple outputs. But where's the other end of this cable? Well, that's just over here in what we call our patch bay. All of the cables come down from the roof and end up over here. And as you can see, they're all labeled S43, S52. And if I fish down, I can find our light here, S89, coming out of our patch bay. And on the end of S89 is the other end of the cable. So think of that as a long extension lead between here, up and over and down to the bar, where the other end of this lead is the plate where we plugged in our light.

S89, and that's labeled here as well on the cable. So I can always double-check that that's my numbers. So this, for example, is where I want to plug in. I want to plug this in. So if I just come over here, behind here, I've got a power point. If I just plug in that light into a power point, the light is now functioning on the bar. And I'll just turn off the lights over there and I'll show you what that looks like. So as you can see, by turning my power point on and off on the wall, I now have control of the light on the bar. But the next question is, how do I control that from a lighting console? I don't want it at full, and I certainly don't want to have people here switching power points on and off.

Now in the olden days, the old dimmer rooms used to be nothing like this. Original theaters used to have, literally, people standing with the old crank handles, kong, kong, turning on and getting ready for the next cue manually. But now that's all done digitally and we can do it from our lighting console out the front. So the next thing I need is what's called a dimmer. There are lots of different types of dimmers. Dimmers that look like this one, dimmers that are wall-mounted, dimmers that look like this. It doesn't really matter the style of dimmer, but dimmers do one thing. They control the intensity of a channel from an instruction via DMX.

The way lighting consoles talk to all lighting equipment is via DMX. And in this example, this dimmer has 12 channels. You can sometimes get dimmers with more or less channels, but by standard, our dimmers are 12 channels. And we'll talk a bit more about the power and calculating power in another lesson. So I now want to take my S89 cable and I want to plug it into channel 10 on my dimmer. Now this is where we need to start thinking about numbers and a whole range of different things. I'm going to get into that when we start to talk about DMX. But at the moment, I just want to show you that by if I manually control this channel 10, I'm now telling the dimmer to send power through number 10 back up and around.

And again, I now have control of the light on the bar. And what the dimmer enables me to do is as I fade down, it enables me to get the light controlled with its intensity brighter or softer until it's off. And so that's also the difference between LEDs and profiles and fresnels. When we're talking about power for lights with light bulbs, profiles, fresnels, footlights, parkans, floodlights, other types of fixtures, they all require a dimmer for you to be able to control the intensity. If you just want to have the light switch on and off, there are also devices that enable that called relay devices or switch packs.

But predominantly, you want to be able to control the intensity and so you need a dimmer. What happens at the other end of the DMX cable, however, we're going to talk about in our next lesson, which is understanding DMX. But I wanted you to be able to understand that from the dimmer down the cable, through the patch bay, up and over, down the loom, down the bar, and to the light, that is how we patch through a fixture that we can control via a dimmer. It's also important to note that power for other lights can also be used for LEDs and moving lights. The patch bay is a way to just control power getting to a bar.

Let's say, for example, on the S89, I had one of my LEDs. LEDs, moving lights, and other intelligent fixtures and dimmers do not mix. Don't plug intelligent fixtures into a dimmer. I have seen shows before where entire racks were not labelled clearly enough and people have plugged in the wrong cables into the wrong racks and blown up entire rigs of moving lights by plugging them into the dimmer and having no control over their park hands and conventional fixtures because they've plugged in the wrong side. In order to do that, the same principle would apply, but we would use something like this, which is called a switched outlet or a relay outlet.

What this is is effectively a small-scale switchboard, which gives us 12 individual channels of powered control. As you can see on this switchboard, we have LX1 LED, LX2 LED, LX3 LED, cage lights, cycler armor lights, LEDs on the panel bars are mirror ball and work lights on the side as well. This is sending consistent hot power through the patch bay, also to fixtures on the bar. It's really important to note that you can have dimmable power and what we call hot power going through the same system to give you two types of power down on the bar. This system also correlates to other areas of the theatre.

However, you might have different patch bays scattered around your theatre to save cable runs. You wouldn't want to have all of your lights from the front coming all the way down here. In some theatres, you have entire dimmer rooms where everything comes to one spot and in some theatres like this one, you've got split areas of patching and control. What we're going to talk about next is how DMX works and what the next steps are for controlling our lighting system.

So now that we understand the concepts of DMX slightly more, I just wanted to give you an example of how DMX and Ethernet and ArtNet come down to the stage from the front of house control. So DMX can run over a protocol called Ethernet, which works over CAT6 cable, which is your standard networking cable, and you can run that over long distances. And what that needs at the other end, however, is what we call an ArtNet decoder, or a streaming ACN decoder, depending on what protocol you're running. And so I just wanted to show you this small patch bay that this CAT6 cable here is coming from the front of house control.

It is simply coiled here and plugs into this node here, which is called an LSC Nexus. LSC is an Australian manufacturer, again, no affiliation with LSC, but they produce some really, really solid and reliable lighting infrastructure systems. They produce generated, not generators, they produce dimmers, distros for hot power, and some of this lighting hardware as well as some lighting consoles of their own. And so what happens is, you can see here we've got five data indicators. This converts the ArtNet signal coming from the lighting console and gives me universes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 coming out of here.

And from there, what happens is it goes in different locations. So Universe 2, if I follow this cable, it goes up to our dimming system and that loops through all the dimmers. So the dimmers are all patched and working on Universe 2. If I go, look at Universe 3, it comes out of here into what's here at the bottom, which is just a DMX splitter. It takes one signal in and gives you another five actually six outputs out of the same signal. And what we can do then is we can send that signal to various places around the venue. So in this instance, we've got patch bays, upstage OP, downstage OP, downstage, prompt the pit and places like that and up to the fly floor.

And correct me if I'm wrong, Matt, there's another one of these up in the roof, isn't there? So up in the roof, there's a secondary Nexus encoder and that's what we send data down to each of the lighting bars themselves. And then this is extra patching on the floor. So often we'll put moving lights on the floor, we might have some moving lights down on the proscenium and this is where we patch all of that data. So Ethernet into the decoder, from the decoder into the splitter and from the splitter out into wherever it needs to go. And so from there, that's how we start to patch Ethernet and Ethernet around the venue.

Alright, see you soon.