Comic Relief at the London Palladium

[Wingwalker]

Does anyone know who is the lighting designer? Looks like the style of Mark Kenyon but I don't know for certain.

[Wizwam]

Does anyone know who is the lighting designer? Looks like the style of Mark Kenyon but I don't know for certain.

 

LD: Oli Richards

Supplier: Aurora lighting hire.

[gareth]

I see Mark Kenyon's name popping up far less frequently on the credits for things these days. Echoes of Brian Pearce a few years ago, perhaps ... there was a time when pretty much any big prime-time LE programme would have Brian's name in the credits, and then he seemed to disappear from the scene (retired, I guess).

 

What seems to be happening a lot more is that people who've been doing moving light programmer/operator work for the last few years are now moving into LD roles. I guess the days of the LD having worked their way up through cameras, vision control and console op have well and truly disappeared!

 

Strikes me that, these days, it's more about the 'eye candy' than it is about good pictures. That's not to say that Comic Relief didn't have good pictures, don't get me wrong ... but increasingly often these days, I find myself turning the TV on to watch something and thinking "ouch, that looks dreadful!". Shadows where there shouldn't be any, underlit faces, flat and lifeless pictures, and so on.

 

Rant over! ;-)

[Wingwalker]

I have to agree, I'm not an lighting designer but I am a lighting tech and have done more shows that I care to think of over a career spanning just short of 30 years. Perhaps we ought to start a grumpy old man campaign and call it something like "Stop the Spinneys".

 

Bring back generics, bring back creativity and bring back decent lighting design :-)

 

David.

[Robin D]

+1. Lighting should be to light the target. If as an audience member I want to be in the limelight, I would have become a soft prop!

[gareth]

Generic fixtures don't need 'bringing back', because they haven't really gone away. The creativity is definitely still there, too, but it increasingly seems to be misdirected. The emphasis these days seems to be more about nice patterns of beams in the air and some nice LED eye candy in shot, and less about the business of actually lighting the people in a way which works for the cameras and looks nice on screen.

 

The two things are definitely not mutually exclusive - I've seen plenty of telly which has nicely-lit turns in a nicely-lit environment. But there's a noticeable shift in priorities sometimes, with the bling taking precedence over the faces.

[Just Some Bloke]

Enjoying watching a bit of dance from time to time, and having lit a whole load of dance shows in my time, I do like to watch 'So You Think You Can Dance'. It annoys the h3ll out of me, though, because in the heats they light the stage with side booms of shins, mids and tops so all areas of the body are lit (perfect) and then for the finals they throw eye candy everywhere, making the stage floor look lovely, and light the dancers with a follow spot and nothing else. All hope of enhancing the beauty of the shapes created is wiped out with a big bright light coming from in front. Wonderful though the eye candy lighting is (and it always very well done) the show is meant to be about the dancers!