Lighting is another incredibly crucial aspect of any theater production. Lighting helps set elements such as time of day, scene transitions, mood, beginning and endings of scenes, and many special effects areas. A lighting designer works with the production team and the director to understand the overall vision of the show and what specific requirements they have such as working with projections or fog, are there specific colors to incorporate or any other effects like creating lighting or storms, or some sort of disco effect!!! We’ve done them all! Our lighting consists of our main lighting board which is computer operated, and our two spotlights to add more specific focus for specific moments. Senior, Zoe Sylvester is our current trusted lighting guru! She has worked closely with Dan Darling, who has years of knowledge and training in stage lighting, and has truly run with the experiences she has been provided. Zoe is now able to take a show, figure out which lights will work for which moments, and pre-set all her cues into the computer herself! Our adult volunteers still work on focusing and setting the actual lighting fixtures, because as you can see from our photos, that requires going up onto a very high ladder or crawling through the ceiling, which we cannot allow our students to do for obvious reasons!
The lighting Board and computer programming that Zoe uses to set her cues and run the entire show!
The lighting designer takes the script, watches the show, communicates with the director and tech director and builds the cues from there. Zoe has creative liberty to use her own creativity and decide what will work best for supporting the story and the performers. She has to think about placement, shadows, balancing scenes and creating moments where they might need to black something out so the audience cannot see a specific action happen, like a quick exit. Our spotlight runners, both use their instruments to highlight and support the overall lighting that Zoe creates. Without lighting, not only would the audience not see what is happening on stage, but the overall visual impact and power of the show itself would be severely lost.
Zoe and Jenny discussing their plan! Jeny manning her spotlight!
The lighting “trees” in our balcony The overhead lighting banks on our stage
One of our lighting instruments Lighting Designer’s workspace
Zoe working her creative magic!!
The glorious view from the lighting board and what they are trying to bring the magic too!!!
Stay tuned next week as we highlight the members of our Company- on and off stage!!!! We open in less than 1 week!!!!