Rosco Spectrum: Ezequiel Nóbili, a Spanish based lighting designer with a long career in live entertainment and television, recently hosted a “Filters” workshop for The Superior Technical School of Architecture of Madrid at LA Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
11 comments:
I think this type of workshop is really cool, and valuable, for all who want to go into the visual arts. I personally believe that a joint class between all of the design options for the purpose of exploring what certain materials, fabrics, and paints look like under certain filters and types of stage light would be extremely valuable not only to the individual designers, but to the culture of collaboration among the designers. I think that sort of a workshop type class along these lines would help scenic designers and costume designers consider what their final design would look like under stage light, and would help lighting designers consider how their final design impacts the final designs of everyone else. Perhaps even sound design, though not (at least primarily) a visual art, would find value in a class on color theory. Certainly, a byproduct of this type of workshop would be an emphasis on open and frequent communication among designers, which I can only see as something positive.
Rosco always comes up with enticing new ways to look at the practice of lighting and how we as designers can further our understanding of human reaction to lights. An interesting concept of this workshop is the investigation into how different light works in different cultures, since a Japanese person may react differently to certain colors of light than a German person, and it's important for a designer to consider the broader cultural context in which they are designing lights in order to have a successful design on all fronts. I also appreciate the reference to people as photosensitive beings as opposed to humans, since it broadens the reach of lighting past just typical humanity. The color mixing shown in the workshop is kind of rudimentary, but still an important concept to have a handle on before moving on to advanced topics. Perceived color is something that I haven't put much thought into, because typically humans will reflect the light that hits them pretty uniformly in terms of color, but once you bring saturated objects into the mix and hit them with saturated gels interesting things that I hadn't considered start to happen. I agree with the author that the skills the workshop imparts are valuable in any discipline of lighting.
"The perceived colour of an object will vary depending on the colour of the light illuminating it." This is one of the most interesting things about visual perception. Everything that a person sees is experienced through their own cognition. So, a blue surrounded by white will look much different than a blue surrounded by yellow. Workshops like these that explore color theory and human perception offer many insights to designers and architects. I agree with Alex in that this would be a neat thing to do here for the scenic and costume designers, or maybe in a more general design class. I liked that they focused on the final visual output of whatever they created at it was lit, rather than separated the object and the lighting. The exercise where the students tried to emulate stained glass was neat. I also liked how they overlapped gels and used subtractive mixing to get the color they wanted, which isn't something that I've seen very much. I'm sure this was a valuable workshop for all the students and I would enjoy doing one myself.
This workshop looks beyond cool and so useful. The results of a day of learning and experimenting were incredible. A workshop like this would benefit every area of design, helping us visual sets and costumes under different lighting and encourage richer discussions between lighting designers, other designers, and directors. Also, I come from a visual arts background and it takes me some time to switch from thinking about mixing pigments to using gels. As a visual learner, this type of lesson would help me a great deal in becoming comfortable with colored light mixing. Based on the final projects shown in the article, I was really inspired to use lights in an installation or sculpture this year in Basic Design. Even using a contemporary painting or artist as a starting point would be an enriching and exciting exercise. Please introduce this in the SoD!
Color is a fascinating and mind boggling series of concepts...color mixing in light versus color mixing in paint are just two totally different beasts. Like many people expressed earlier in this thread, this workshop looked amazing. Being able to work hands on is what really did it for me-- I'm a big advocate for learning simply by doing.The section where the designer spoke about how our perception of light changes the color and an object's relationship really did it for me. I had always been taught growing up to always keep in mind the light source whenever drawing or painting because it can drastically change the color. The very room that you live in right now goes through around a dozen of different color palettes every day due to the changing angle of the sun. When trying to capture that essence of the room, your set of colors may be all completely warm if it is around 5PM and all cooler colors if it's 3AM. Like Jacob said, what's also very important to keep in mind is cultural context and how understanding of color varies from culture to culture. This reminds me of the Himba Tribe from Namibia and how in their language, color is not used or described in the same way that we use it in the English language; they "do not classify green or blue separately." This is the link to a NY Times article talking about this phenomenon if you would like to know more! : http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/its-not-easy-seeing-green/
Color is so crazy. It is so normal in our day to day lives, yet it has the ability to effect us emotionally, our visual preselection of the world, and it self in different layers. Separating color in the form of pigment and light is a little strange to think about in the world of theater because its easy to understand why paints operates with pigment, but a lighting designer uses gels which are a physical sheet to alter color in the light world, onto pigmented surfaces. This article, didn't really explain the technicalities to it, it kept it more fun and just explained different phenomenon faced when experiencing with light. The pictures were very engaging and interesting. I always thought it would be fun to try piecing gels together and create a scene or look, watching the way they do it, makes it seem like there is a lot more to consider than just blue sky and green grass.
Light color mixing always messes me up so much. Like how can it be that when you add thee light colors you get white but when you add three paint colors you get brown? It’s such a mind boggling concept for me. I think this workshop would be immeasurably helpful to teach and explore light, and would be even more useful for any painters or fine artists in general who work with pigment. It seems like some part of this workshop talked about using colored light on colored surfaces (and if it didn’t I would be surprised) which is really awesome because I know that the color mixing can affect the color your brain perceives the original painted color and you can get some really wacky combinations that you wouldn’t normally expect. And knowing those combinations can make you a better designer or artist by helping you know what the best color of light is to make the physical object look the best it can be.
This seems to be an incredibly fun and cool class to have. The way Mr. Nóbili arranges his class and provides hand-on experience to his students is a great example of good teaching. It is always more helpful and effective if students can actually apply what they learn to practice instead of just being told how things work without seeing them. I believe for design students especially, the possibility to actually put their hands on things while they learn is extremely important.
The subject of Mr. Nóbili's lessons - colors - can also be widely applicable to theatre industry. Whether you are a costume designer, draper, stitcher, buyer, or work with light sound media or scenery, it is so worth it to train your eyes to be sharp and sensitive on colors. The ability to see the nuances of colors and how they interact with each other and your work may result in beautiful art. In a more general sense, being able to tell the slight difference among a tons of, say, pinkish colors will impact the way you view your surroundings, how you decorate your bedroom or how you dress yourself. I wish there are workshops like this available at Purnell!
As someone who loves painting I think colors and color theory are super interesting. While baffling, I think light mixing and color theory in terms of how colored light affects us is incredibly cool, not to mention 110% related to theater and lighting/scenic/media design. The projects inspired by church stained glass window are so beautiful. I think it’s very difficult for someone who is interested in art and beauty to not be captured by the way light filters through colored glass and lands on the surfaces on either side. I still remember the awe-inspiring feeling of walking into Notre Dame in Montreal and seeing the pews illuminated by shafts of colored light from all sides of the cathedral. It’s enough to make anyone feel religious! The landscape projects are also very interesting, because it explores the ideas of overlapping filters, and the intensity/ absorption of certain gels. I don’t think I ever quite wrapped my head around what Keith taught us in lighting stagecraft last year about how different types of gels will be more/less affected by the light depending on how much light it absorbs vs. how much it lets through. Overall, I think that lighting color mixing is fascinating, and it’s very cool how the teacher here was able to show how different combinations and uses of colored light emit very different emotions.
I think that this type of intensive workshop would be incredibly beneficial to non lighting design majors. I'm sure they would enjoy and benefit from it as well, but it may be slightly redundant. As a director, I think this type of workshop would be incredibly engaging an educational. I do not understand color within lighting whatsoever. I don't understand how to mix filters to get another color, or shade of colors. Although I may not need mastery in that skill, it would still prove a helpful language to learn. With a workshop like this I would be able to more fluently communicate my ideas with a lighting designer.
As a visual artist who has been drawing & painting my whole life, this is HUGE for me. Ever since I truly got my grasp around color when I first started using it, I was instantly hooked on the amazing characteristics color has. Although I'm used to using pigment colors as opposed to those created using light, there are some relationships that carry over. Color is a phenomenon in itself that almost every artist should have at least some understanding of. Color psychology is extremely important when you're connecting your "colorful" work with an audience. The way our society has come to perceive color is extremely important in your designs. For example, red is a power color that infers action but can also be negative as it indicates danger or anger. Blue can be calming but can indicate sadness and gloominess. These characteristics for each color must be understood when designing lights or sets for a theatrical performance where you help set the mood for the entire show.
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