Lighting design is the discipline that decides what the audience sees of your show, and how. It is the difference between a stage you look at and a stage you feel. Done well, it disappears. Done poorly, it is the only thing the audience remembers about the production.
Module 2 taught the equipment — what each fixture does and how to make it work safely. Module 7 picks up where that stopped. Here we treat lighting as a creative discipline. The goal is not to make a brighter show. The goal is to make a show that supports the storytelling, scene by scene, with intention behind every cue.
The audience never says "what nice lighting". They say "what a powerful scene". That's the brief.
So we find ourselves up here on the front-of-house lighting bridge and the reason I wanted to bring you up here with me is to give you an example of how we focus a front-of-house wash. Now primarily in a theatre show I would personally set two lots of six front-of-house profiles and those front-of-house profiles would be doing a left-center right or an OP center prompt pair at what we call a mechanicalist which is a 45 degrees as close as possible to 45 degrees and I would be doing that in a warm and a cool wash. Now there's a lot to be said about the power of LED profiles with color and flexibility but for the purists in me as a lighting designer there is something to be said about the warmth and the color toning of using conventional fixtures in your front-of-house positions.
Color in LED profiles is really great on stage from boom positions from perch positions where you can have a bit more flexibility and you're trying to catch sides and trying to catch contouring and set elements but I find that still to this day if I can get a nice warm and cold front-of-house wash and the way I use a cold wash is I use a bit of Lee 201 gel or sometimes some Lee 200 if I want it to be slightly cooler and I will use that to light my performers. Now in this front-of-house bridge position it's very comfortable focusing there's a lot of profiles up here we've got what's called a source for zoom which gives us a couple of options with zoom lenses as opposed to what we looked at earlier which is our fixed lenses which are primarily 14 degree and 19 degrees in these front-of-house positions and the further you get back from stage you'll start to be in the realms of 5 degree 10 degree lenses which are keeping the image of the light small from a much further distance away so it's all down to the lens and the calculation of the engineers who make these lights to put that in range and we're discussing our design and our CAD course how we can use technology to help us calculate what those are when we're specifying but for now I'm going to just ask Matt in a moment to kill the lights up here we'll refocus the camera and I'll start to talk you through how I would focus a couple of specials onto a performer who in this example will look at being downstage center so let's look at that now we'll talk you through what that what that looks like and perhaps use a bit of frost and some color if it's available and I'll show you about a little bit more about front-of-house bridges all right let's get into it all right so I'm going to just take you with me on an adventure here so as you can see I've just selected two profiles now one of the profiles is down here next to me which is this one here you can see the light under the back and then the other profile is further around so excuse my face further around this pillar around the dress circle to and I'm going to put a special downstage center and downstairs center here is down where that center mark is just down there where my fingers pointing so what I might do is I'm just going to wrangle the camera so that you can get a full real-time experience of the focus no editing here you get to experience all of the communication with Matt as well and well I'm here also I just wanted to point out the the power of the box boom position is is really good for lighting edge of faces for anyone in front of this proscenium and getting shots upstage as you can see here the roof of the proscenium I'm going to be limited on my shots because I'm going to start hitting the cyclorama and I'm going to lose face light so that's when I would rely on these box boom positions to start giving me a bit of fill in these up stage corners because I can get a lot more control up into these areas underneath the proscenium and also right along the back wall there which is worth noting as well we've got all of the patch bay for front of house so there's a patch bay and more dimmers up here because we run a split front of house system whereas some theaters would run all this front of house patching back to a central dimmer room so that's just a note as well from further in our in our patching discussion all right we'll get this all plugged in and we will and we'll get into it all right so here so if you could kill the workers for me up here and maybe even how are we looking you may be even kill the back of house workers as well we're going to a focus state that would be great thank you so Matt's just going to go and kill that work like there and this is these are the sorts of you know discussions we would be having in real time as we did a focus and and it's really important to hear that you know the communication is really good between Matt and I often if you have a designer you want to make sure that your crew chief and your lighting crew all on comms and really easily able to understand each other so these lights I see have an iris in them as well so I think you can see me putting the iris in and out here for this example I might just pop the iris is out and in in this situation these source 4s here are primarily for extra specials so they don't really have a standard focus that's why one's over there as a as a rectangle I would hazard a guess that that's generally used for a lectern special or something like that and I might even ask Matt to to do that Matt would you mind just bringing elect turn out and maybe putting it on downstage center for me thank you so let's use this as an example you know electern special you know done correctly really makes or breaks a stage a stage focus and a stage presence so the three things I would look at in doing a lectern special would be two key lights from the front at about a 45 degree angle and then one backlight from the back to give some illumination over the shoulders and in the hair and helps give that that difference so what do I what I would do here in this initial stage is I would start off by potentially just using my side shutters as a as a central cut now I know from doing this for years and I'm going to need about I need about that much headroom I'm going to drop my my shutters in here and the important thing to remember when we're doing lighting focus is that your top shutter is this is my top shutter physically but it's my bottom shutter illuminate it likewise top is bottom bottom is top so right is left and left is right so I'm going to start there and I'm going to say that's probably about right so what I'm going to do now is go over to my other fixture as I navigate past the camera in the dark quietly then come around to the come around to the bridge here the first thing I'm going to do is I notice there's a bit of frost in here so I'm going to pull that out of the frame and open up my shutters I'm going to pull that iris out now by doing that you can see already that from adding this as well you'll see two shadows start to appear on the actual lectern itself and that's what we want we want that nice 45 degree my candlest wash now from there I'm going to go sharp sharp again and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to match my my corner cuts almost making like a rectangle of train track I'm going to adjust my bottom shutter and my top shutter to be relatively across stage and though the the temptation would be to have your shutters follow the line I try and find a horizontal line on the stage deck and keep them keep them balanced that way now from here I'm happy with that I'm just going to undo my lens I'm going to go push slightly forward a sharp so I move my lens slightly forward and you can see the difference there one is the light coming from the prompt side is soft and the light coming from the OP side is sharp and what I'm going to do now is I sneak back past the camera just going to zoom in slightly so you can see that focus so you can see that we're sharp and soft there but we're getting a nice 45 degree angle behind the lectern I'm just going to come here and undo this one and go slightly forward a sharp again and now I'm going to ask Matt Matt would you mind being a model just facing upstage for me and just putting your hands out to your side the key thing now is to think about headroom so if Matt's standing there now I can see already that him's Matt standing at the lectern I can see in the shadow that I'm losing Matt's head now if he's standing at the lectern he would be okay we can see that his shadow is fully encompassing his hands and his head on both shots we've got a nice 45 degree but if he does take a step back we start to lose that so in order for that safety margin because sometimes people like to stand back from the lectern slightly I'm just going to open up my bottom shutter and just give a little bit more and you can see in this example now that on that side on this light we're catching his head and on this side we're not so that would be my new shuttle line thank you Matt how what I'm going to do now is go and adjust this profile to meet that line and that is how we would focus a downstage special now of course I I tend to use a straighter cut of lectern it's 100% optional as to how you would like to do that if I adjust this quickly just so we can have a look at it that now I know will be a comfortable lectern special for one person or even two or three people standing side by side but if you were worried you can even just run out your special like this run that out on both sides open your side shutters out our bottom and top cuts remain the same and it looks weird because we're looking at it from the front but from the audience's perspective it'll just look like a really clean special so you could do something like that open the sides out let them run and you'll see that in that middle section of double overlap intensity we've got a nice area for two three four people wide and we've got enough to catch them from their you know catch all their heads and make sure they're lit fully so that's how I would recommend focusing a downstage special from our front of house bridge
Now that we've got the work lights back on, I just wanted to show you in a bit more detail the gobo and the iris that we were talking about with the profile. So this is a gobo and it's in at what's called a gobo holder, naturally, and what that is when I open it up is just a really thin piece of aluminium. You can see that there, it's very, very thin, and these are available to buy. There's manufacturers of gobos. In the old days I used to literally get a piece of biscuit tin and cut holes in it myself, or flatten out a couple of coke cans in an emergency and cut holes in them. So they can be anything you like, generally aluminium for the heat, and this one's from a company called gobo tech.
So you can, I've no affiliation with gobo tech, but they are Australia's premier gobo supplier. You can order them from a catalogue or you can even do custom gobos where you send in a logo, a school logo, whatever it might be, and they can cut that either in metal or you can even get glass gobos. And this is an A-size gobo. No, it's not. This is a B-size gobo. This is a B-size gobo. They come in A, B, and M, are your three sizes, generally, A and B for profiles, traditional profiles, and M size, often for moving lights. So that literally slots in here. You sort of centre that up in the slot, and then that goes into the gate or the gobo slot of the profile.
The other element was this, which is the iris, and this is our typical James Bond style, and this is what slots into the light to give you that extra control of size of beam. So it's purely just a mechanical adjuster, and again, depending on what you're doing with your design, the designer may call for an iris to give you a little bit more control, and that just depends on what's happening at the time. So that's the gobo and the iris, and they would go with the profile, whether that's LED or traditional analog. Alright, on to the positions.
So now we're going to talk about some of the lighting positions in a theatre and these are primarily the positions that will always be your baseline and depending on the size of your theatre you may or may not have these positions, but they're great to talk about anyway. So as you know, first and foremost we've got our overhead lights. These are what we call electric bars or LX bars. In theatre, LX is the short term abbreviation for the lighting department or the electricians department. So we call them LX1, LX2. Primarily, we always start at the proscenium line, so we'll have electric bars starting LX1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 as many as you need and they will be from there and then in front of the proscenium we call them front of house bars or bridge bars and we'll talk about them in a minute.
But electric bars go across the stage and overhead. In this theatre, for example, we have three overhead electric bars, LX1, 2 and 3 and we also have LX4 which is a row of lights used for the cyclorama which we'll talk about in a minute and that gives us specific lighting control for the cyclorama which is the large white element that's flown. In this case the back wall is the cyclorama but you can also have a flown cyclorama. If we work our way around we then have what's called the panorama bars. As we mentioned before in our mechanist section, the panorama bars actually run up and down stage. Electric bars run across stage and panoramas run up and down and this is a great way to have side lighting positions.
Now often you'll have panorama bars flown high and these are all hanging on what's called a lighting ladder purely because it looks like a ladder. It's a piece of steel that's been welded together to have different rungs to give you different heights. Now often what will happen in a dance school is that you will have what's called a boom position or ground position and that will be a piece of pipe can be up to four or five meters tall but generally two or three meters tall and you'll have lights here at body height and also low what we call shin busters, lights down low down here to light seat ankles and side light dancers.
In dance environment side light is very, very, very important as it contours the body but we'll talk about that more in our lighting design section sorry of the course. Moving to the front of stage now we also in this venue have lighting positions here on the proscenium so this can often be called a pro boom, a proscenium boom, a pro perch, anything on the proscenium in this case there's a bar that runs up and over can be used for side mounting lights, lights can be rigged horizontally vertically upside down in any orientation that's required. Moving to the front of stage we have these two lights which are called a blinder and they're a type of footlight as the name implies they are at your feet and so they are used for footlight for low lighting under the chin for a whole number of different effects, shadows, spooky moments, low light.
In some shows you'll even have what's called a show deck on the floor and there'll be lights built into the set so you can have up lights on set pieces, people working at a cauldron and who need a little bit of a light up there face from the floor can all be mounted in the floor so they're called footlights or floorlights. The next position is called the box boom, now generally they're called box booms because there would be a row of seats called the Juliet boxes and often the lights are periodically placed around them. In this theater they are in a vertical formation, sometimes box booms are horizontal and there might be two or three levels of box booms and sometimes you may even have a secondary box boom position that's further out.
Now the benefit of having lights on an angle is that we always want to be lighting people at a 45 degree angle where possible and having positions out here, out the front and above us gives us design options. So they're the box booms, as we discussed earlier the lights out the front under the balcony are called the circle rail and the circle rail lights are a lot shallower but it gives us a position for front on lights and often we'll have lights out there with gobos, patterns, perhaps a projector, so moving lights if you need to project things onto stage. And our last position here is the, we have one front of house bridge, in some theaters you have three or four bridges, but they're called front of house bridges because they're in the front of the house, they're over the house, the auditorium is called the house and they're front of house shining back onto stage.
So with those elements, box booms, circle rails, sometimes they're called perches and the front of house bridges, that's what we use as our complement of positions to light the stage and then we've got overhead boom and panobar positions to light things on stage and across stage. So depending on the theater, depending on your layout, they are some of the positions that you will find ready to light your theater.
Pick up a clean copy of the script. As you read, mark in coloured pen:
By the end of the first pass you should have a script that looks like a colouring book. That's the right amount of marking. Anyone who tells you they "just read it through and have ideas" has skipped a step they will regret in tech.
Stanley McCandless's method, published in 1932, remains the default for naturalistic stage lighting. The principle: every acting area is lit by two front-light fixtures, one warm and one cool, at 45 degrees from front and 45 degrees from side, one from the left and one from the right.
This produces three benefits:
Start every design with McCandless coverage of every acting area. Once that's working, add the specials, washes and effects. The order matters. Specials without a base look like blobs of colour in the dark.
The most powerful tool a designer has is restraint. A show with three colour palettes used deliberately will read more strongly than a show with twelve. The mental model:
| Show length | Palette count | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 10-minute one-act | 1 palette | Pick one. Stay with it. Shift only at climax. |
| 30-minute short play | 2 palettes | Day vs night. Interior vs exterior. Reality vs memory. |
| 2-hour full production | 3-5 palettes max | Each palette should map to a distinct dramatic territory. If you can't name what territory a palette serves, cut it. |
Saturation budgets matter too. Deep blues and deep reds eat 60-80% of the fixture's output. A scene lit entirely in saturated colour will read as dim and uncertain to the audience, no matter how brightly the fader is pushed.
The lighting plot is the document that everyone — production manager, rigger, stage manager, console operator — works from. Treat it as a legal document. If a fixture appears on the plot, it must be hung. If a fixture is in the rig but not on the plot, it must be removed or added (in writing) to the plot. The plot, channel list and patch sheet must always reconcile.
Students who treat the plot as "a rough sketch" produce shows that nobody can re-mount. Students who treat the plot as a contract produce shows that can be lent to another school and rehung exactly. This is the difference between hobby-level and program-level lighting work.
Every cue is one of two things:
A common student mistake is to design too many transitions — micro-cues every few lines that the audience reads as "lighting flicker". The cleaner discipline: design strong states that hold for whole beats, with intentional transitions only at scene shifts and dramatic turning points. Trust the state to do the work.
Choose any single scene from a play you have access to. On a single A4 sheet:
Bring it to a colleague who has read the same scene. Ask them what they see. If they see what you intended, the design is working.
The tech rehearsal is where designs survive contact with reality. The director will ask for changes. The performers will block differently from what was rehearsed. A fixture will fail in the moment.
The designer's discipline in tech:
Module 7 builds on Module 2 (Lighting Fundamentals). Cue calling is the Module 1 (Stage Management) skill that delivers your design. Module 4 (Risk Assessment) covers the safety overlay for any fixture or focus call. Module 8 (Sound Design) is the parallel discipline — you should design lighting and sound together where possible, with the director, in the same room.