Despite what some of us would like to believe about ourselves, lighting directors and television directors of photography rarely emerge from the womb knowing our craft. I was already 8 years old when I discovered an interest in electronics, and it wasn't until my mid-teens that I discovered lighting. Even then, it was theater lighting that held my thrall until I stumbled into the television industry in my early 20s.
My interest in lighting in all its forms has never diminished and consequently over the decades I have gone on to light everything from theater to musicals, opera, dance, circus, concerts, nightclubs, hotels, meeting rooms, quarries, museums, exhibitions, trade shows, parks, building interiors and exteriors and art installations. Every new medium presents its range of technical, cultural and aesthetic constraints and freedoms. The constant need to adapt and learn new skills is what has made it all so much fun.
LIGHTING FOR THE CAMERA
I have come to recognize just how lucky I was to have made the hardest of all transitions so early in my journey. Lighting for the camera is so very different to lighting for the eye that some people never successfully complete the change. Unfortunately some of the unsuccessful ones work in television, relying on a formulaic approach to lighting, without ever really understanding what they're doing.
These thoughts came to mind a few weeks ago when a live production colleague was plunged into lighting a television production by accident. He is a capable, clever and very experienced lighting designer/lighting director whose portfolio ranges from dance parties and corporate dinners to variety concerts, rock concerts, casino shows and even animatronic displays.
He had been engaged at short notice to light a stadium benefit concert for the victims of a natural disaster. As the groundswell of community support grew, more well-known local acts offered to perform at the gig, making the show more complex at every step. The stage and lighting package was donated by local suppliers and was in the process of being rigged when a local television station decided to ramp up their coverage from a single ENG crew shooting a highlights package, to a full live outside broadcast of the show. At this point, a substantial number of 2K Fresnels were added to the rig, and the LD began to wonder what on earth he had gotten himself into.
SEEKING A SOLUTION
He had a fair idea of television's comparatively limited contrast range, and had already ordered neutral density filters for the boomerangs of the 3K Followspots, in case they overwhelmed the rest of the sources. However what really concerned him was how to deal with the spread of color temperatures present to light faces: xenon followspots, general washes from the 2K Fresnels at 3200K and his principal coverage of the solo artists with steeply-angled 10 degree Source 4 Ellipsoidals at 3000K.
Based on his description of the followspots as 3K Xenon Troupers, which Strong lists as being a 5600K source, my suggestion was to simply follow the rule book and use a full CT Orange to bring them into the tungsten range. Surprisingly, that wasn't a practicable solution for this show.
The real wildcard in the system was the brightness of the Source 4 Ellipsoidals at a throw of about 50 feet. These were so bright and so steep that when it was time to set the balance, they were dimmed way down into the orange, and then corrected back up again with 1/2 CT Blue. This was too much correction, which pushed the color balance up into the blue. Hence when the fully-corrected xenon spots were brought in, they looked both too orange and too dim to fill in the steep facial shadows from the source 4 ellipsoidals. Consequently the spots were eventually balanced out with a 1/2 CTO and a 1/4 minus-green.
Only hours before airtime, a very experienced television LD volunteered his services to sit with our live LD colleague, riding the preview switcher and offering suggestions about problem pictures before they got to air, thus giving the live LD a chance to concentrate more on the flow of the production than the detail of the shots. The show went to air, with audiences and media making comments about the acts and nobody mentioning the lighting, which is after all, the way it's really meant to be.
I didn't see a single frame of the broadcast as it wasn't shown where I live, and I missed the highlights on the news the following day. However, a few days after the broadcast my live LD colleague e-mailed me about how the show went, what decisions he took about color temperature in the end, and how he will never again undertake to both light and operate a live television broadcast. (It made me wonder how many times I've made and broken that very same promise.)
CREATIVITY WITHIN TECHNICAL CONFINES
While this tale demonstrates that given even moderate support, a talented and professional lighting designer can hold their own in almost any production form, it also brought home to me some of the deeper and subtle skills that we acquire in the process of learning how to deal with the foibles of the television medium. In my rapid briefing to my colleague on the basic process of color temperature selection and correction, there was no time to introduce the notion of the pickup system's 200K tolerance around the white balance point, and how you can manipulate that point to optimize your levels, corrections and exposures. Indeed there are some within our profession who haven't caught on to the idea either.
From talking to designers and technicians from all walks of lighting, I've come to realize that what we do is only very slightly understood. The rest of the lighting world sees us with a light meter, or perhaps even a color temperature meter in our hand from time to time, and draws the conclusion that we're confined by the technical requirements of our camera systems. They fail completely to see that it is within those narrow bands of tolerance that so much of our skill and creativity is unleashed.
Andy Ciddor has been involved in lighting for more than three decades as a practitioner, teacher and writer. You can reach him via e-mail c/oTV Technology.
