Colour Temperature Contrast/ Lighting Theatre

[BenEdwards]

Hi, I come from a film background, both lighting and grading, there are a number of different ways of drawing the eye to things. These include light level, saturation and Colour Temperature (http://www.photographymad.com/pages/view/what-is-colour-temperature).

 

Colour temperature is on the kelvin scale, it goes from 10,000 (blue), through Amber, 3,000 and to orange, 1000. Warmer colours focusing the eye.

 

Was thinking of using this principle for Theatre by having a warmer light from front/centre (straw or double straw) and having open lanterns for back and side.

 

So did a bit of reading up and came across McCandless, which makes be think that rather than using side lighting it would be better to push a different colour in from SL/SR front to make things look more three dimensional. This is something even more important in film as you are looking at a 2D image so you tend to make this a bit more extreme, in film it is called modelling.

 

So combining Colour Temperature contrast and McCandless I am thinking open back and SL/SL front and warmer front lighting.

 

Thoughts?

 

Ben

[Whiskers]

1) The eye (audience receptor (optical)) has a poor memory but can differentiate very small contrasts when comparing in real life. Tungsten is the norm "white" about 3000 when the luminare is at 100%, work your contrasts above and below that.

 

2) Beware do not use just Correction filters, all the shades in the "theatre swatch" are bought and have a use somewhere, the big exception is CTB 1/2 CTB aka 201 202

 

3) Try to read UK designers Bentham Pilbrow .........

 

I worry when you say SIDE Above and 45 is where light comes from in the real world and its where a ARO expects it to come from.

[kerry davies]

My lighting bible was "Painting With Light" by John Alton even though in technical terms it is ancient history. Some of the tricks he used are standard practice in film such as ; "always have the brightest area of the scene right at the back." He also said that if you only had three lanterns two need to be 45/45 from each side at the front and one at 45/45 from a back corner to give the modelling and depth. That key light or backlight is then the one with most saturated colour and you can see this most easily in rock lighting.

 

I think that the reverse of your conclusion is more a true "rule of thumb" but, as so often in creative discipline, there is no right or wrong. My "signature" look involved few lanterns, low intensity, angled lighting and candles whenever and wherever possible. Absolute crap in cinematic terms but it worked for me in my circumstances. Half the time I didn't use much if any front lighting, relying on angles and shades to model and create atmosphere.

 

The best advice is that you should experiment and play with no limitations until you find what suits you, your circumstances and your desired outcome. Take a look at American In Paris, the only film ever to get two Oscars for lighting design and the only one to get a special Oscar for Gene Kelly's dance scenes which Alton lit. It breaks every "rule" in every book. In the set piece fountain scene every shadow radiates from the centre of the screen. Magic. (Opinion!)

[Just Some Bloke]

The usual way is to use warm and cold as contrasts state-by-state, so that if you've had a warm scene and you want a contrast in the next scene then go cold. Also useful to show interior (warm) versus exterior (cold), but that doesn't work if it's supposed to be summer!

 

If mixing warm and cold in the same state it would just be a matter of warming up the cold colour or cooling down the warm colour, rather than having different hues from each angle.

 

Instead, the more usual way of getting the MacCandless idea of the differing colours from your 2 front 45s is simply to find 2 different warms and/or 2 different colds. You might do 103 from SL and 205 from SR, for instance, in your warm wash or 117 from SL and 201 from SR in your cold wash. This means that you still have a little contrast on the 2 sides of the face, but your warm washes are still warm and your cold washes are cold, rather than confusing the viewer as to what temperature you're trying to suggest.

 

Hope that helps.

[paulears]

The thing that surprises me is that in movies and TV production colour temperature is critical - and the people involved spend hours generating looks and tweaking the colours in the highlights, mid tones and low lights, when in theatre even quite strong colour shifts get forgotten about and become 'the norm'. A white light that is strongly orangey gradually becomes white. Same with a blue one, and we only really notice when things change. Our warms and cools are rarely realistic, but work in theatrical settings - when the film people would be panicking like mad. I've always found that no matter how well versed we are in our reading of our own favourites - and I found McCandless to be not that much an easy read. Bentham was also very strict in his treatment of colour. Reid and Pilbrow were the ones I understood and to a degree (a big one sometimes) copied. I often looked at the swatch books and ordered some of the lesser known colours they were using. Invariably, because I'm disorganised, I'd end up using them and only later realising that I had two different colours left and right. Similar, but not the same. I often left them like this because they seemed to look nice. I'm not sure why I didn't wonder more about it.

[dbuckley]

It's been hinted at, but: When the curtain goes up, the audience calibrates to whatever lighting colour attitude they are given, and then work from there as colour tone changes throughout the performance. You have to go a long way from a "normal-ish" palette on the opening gambit to shift the audience out of their "normal" zone.

[Junior8]

The fact that Ridge and Aldred stressd the importance of the 45/90 principle and recomended McCandless in 1935 confirms the eternal verities of the theatrical needs - first of all to illuminate the action as efficiently as possible. After that cools and warms are very much down to choice I ended up feeling that it didn't matter much provided they were there. I think it's no acident that the cinemoid range offered far less choice than we have today. For me the most nfluential books are Pilbrow and Gillespie Williams and though I like Bentham's opinionated writing he - much to his own regret - was never a practitioner like say Joe Davies. I find McCandless totally unreadable.