Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Creating Daylight In An 11″ Space
Rosco Spectrum: The design team for Clybourne Park, this year’s Tony Award winner for Best Play, had a real problem.
The upstage wall of the set calls for a kitchen window, through which the audience needs to see daylight. But there were only 11 inches between the back wall of the set and the back wall of the theater!
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4 comments:
Wow, talk about an engineering challenge. I would think there would be some teams that would throw their hands up and say it couldn't be done! The design team did a great job hunting down an effective solution and I suppose it is fortunate that Rosco sells such a specialized product.
11" is really not that much space to play with, but I imagine that the 1/3" thick Rosco High Output LitePad gets the job done with ease! And hopefully due to the product's reliance on LEDs, no electrician is going to have to climb back there to performance maintenance on them!
The recreation of daylight always seems to be an obstacle for lighting teams. There is no perfect way to recreate the cool/warm omnidirectional glow. Knowing that the available space was limited, and that the design teams could pull off the right look in their allowed space, is amazing. The ease and the realistic quality of this "daylight" proves that theatrical technology is brilliant and there are endless possibilities. Who knows, maybe one day we will actually be able to channel the sun!
This is a perfect example of how even Broadway designers have to work with extremely limited resources such as this 11” gap. Its also interesting to me what the solution was, especially given all he constraints put forth by the lighting designer, such as color temperature. It’s lucky for them that such a product exists. I would have liked this article to go more in depth into what the fixture is as opposed to just certain convenient features. I also wonder if during the process of creating realistic looking daylight, they ran into any problems because of the spectrum spikes that are inherent to the use of LEDs.
11 inches, even though it sounds like somewhat a lot in comparison to a foot, is still extremely small, and the requirements of the lighting effect that needed to be fit in that space - and was accomplished - is simply amazing. There are constantly new improvements in the world of technical theatre and the technology used in the industry, and the custom fixture used for this situation is awe inspiring.
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