Thursday, November 24, 2016
How To Bring Your Story To Life –With The Bare Necessities
Rosco Spectrum: When you’re retelling a classic, you need to make sure you portray the story and the characters properly, while also making sure that the familiar scenes are lively and stimulating to capture the imagination of an audience. Lighting designer Jordan Green achieved all of that in his design for the United States premiere of of Dzsungel Könyve, a Hungarian musical adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s classic The Jungle Book that was produced by Gooseberry Park Players in Moorhead, MN. What we found most compelling was how he accomplished most of the major design elements using only Rosco gels and gobos.
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9 comments:
I find it really interesting that a grand portion of this article was centered around the idea of specific lighting decisions. You see the products of the lighting but I have never seen anyone show their gel choices for specific lighting angles as well as the gobos used and at what degrees they were used. I think this helps in a lot of ways to see these specific choices because it can help guide you closer to or farther from these choices and how they blend with colors on the set. It is also comforting to know that the way to “bring your story to life” is through lighting. Of course I have always thought this. Lighting brings the context to the environment. The “how” of what you should feel in the space. The depth of detail that went into the creation of this piece was astounding. Seriously remarkable.
Well this is kind of a curious article. Ah yes, gels & gobos, how powerful. Much color, very breakup template. Foggers! Do articles on the Rosco website such as this one really sway lighting designers to buy more Rosco products? At a certain point, color & gobos across the four main manufacturers (Rosco, GAM, Apollo, LEE) are commodities. And gel & gobos are not exactly the cutting edge of their product lines anymore. I'd be much more interested in an article highlighting the use of Rosco's new LitePad product.
I guess this article is humorous to me because there is a lot of "Yee olde stagecraft" in here, with the use of split colors, twin-spins, double gobos, etc. In this era of everything changing color and moving and strobing, it is curious to see a Lighting Design with a very conventional palette of tools. I'd be curious to know what kind of lighting fixture he installed the Twinspin foot-light system into. Certainly, if it was a Source-4, there must have been a ton of room to hide that unit as a foot-light!
While these sorts of “look at someone using our products!” articles are always a bit hokey, I actually do think this article makes some good examples. Two elements that I frequently see either fly or fail onstage are moons on cycs and fake fire effects. I was recently at a performance where the moon, and I’m serious here, could have been a giant up-lit cookie. Like a 5’ wide cookie flown upstage. No bueno. In that same performance, an actress got so close to a silk-fire effect fixture, that it completely killed any level of illusion that was there (trust me, I wasn’t fooled by any degree to start). Meanwhile, based on this article’s photos, I think both the moon and fire effects look fairly successful. Putting a moon on a cyc will never really look perfect, but this one certainly looks better than the space-cookie I was subjected to a couple weeks ago. And while many productions are now using a lot of intelligent and moving fixtures, this definitely isn’t a necessity to achieve good lighting. These fixtures just make it easier or more efficient often times, with only some new effects gained from what was available before. Because, c’mon, are you really going to use that clown-barf gobo through a 5-facet prism, with gobo shake and rotate, in your next production? Probably not. These fixtures offer a lot of bells and whistles but you don’t really need all of them all the time. I think this article would just be a bit easier to read if it didn’t feel like an early 2000s music video with product placement so aggressive you feel the need to look away. But I guess that should be expected on a manufacturer’s website.
I have to agree with Ben on this one. Who are they trying to get the attention of with this article? Do they really think that they will sway the future of lighting design by a product that has been around since the beginning of modern theater design? Gels and gobos are what put Rosco and many other theatrical lighting companies on the map but I don’t think they should continue to pour resources into this. Rosco has released many products in recent year that have caught the attention of many and that is the direction lighting is going. Gels and gobos are a product that will sell themselves as they have for many years. Gels and gobos are certainly going to be used for many more years in the theater industry, but it is certainly not something to marvel over. I guess what I am trying to say is good job Rosco for all that you have done for the lighting industry, but let’s be honest gels and gobos are nothing new, designer across the country know their capability and what they can achieve. So let them speak for themselves.
This article felt like one of those lame "how-to" videos. I barely know anything about lighting design, but this still felt incredibly basic and overly advertisey. I'm not sure what one should expect from a company writing an article about how to use their products. I'm not sure this would sway a Rosco-user to buy more Rosco, but maybe it could sway a newbie? I genuinely hope there is someone out there that read this article and then went and bought Rosco gels. This article is too good for it to go to waste. I enjoyed reading it. It was lame, it was chummy, but it was enjoyable. I especially loved the pictures and the graphics.
Beyond the advertisement level of this, it was great to look into the design elements of a show. It's rare that someone would ever know the exact gels and gobos used on a show. This was a unique look into the mechanics of someone's design.
Lighting design is of great importance for theatres as they not only highlight the storytelling but also render the set and costumes more flattering. I once found a dress at the warehouse from a show that I worked on and I could not believe how pale and worn it looked in florescent light because it was pure gorgeous onstage. Sometimes good lighting can accomplish the majority of the set depending on what kind of productions are made.
For all the amazing images of the lighting design in Dzsungel Könyve, this article does sound like a marketing pitch about some gels and gobos from Rosco, especially with the last paragraph that starts with “For more information on how Rosco products can bring your next production to life, visit our Theatre Solutions Page”…… But then I realize this article is from the Rosco website so it makes sense to focus on the specific and detailed information about color gel choices and how the designer utilizes their products. I'm not familiar with the techniques and specifics about lighting design and what's cutting edge what's old school, but I feel like there are always designers who work better with conventional tools and techniques and they still achieve stunning production. The article is not trying to sell that they have the most edgy products that everyone should see how cool their color palettes.
While this article was very interesting to read and to see the choices that were made by the designer, I don't really see the point to it. It provided some useful information for people who have never used gels or gobos before, but it was not necessarily revolutionary. I have seen many designers make the decisions that this designer made. It is also not a revolutionary idea that theaters don't use real flames due to the amount of precautions that are required. It is much simpler to recreate fire with light, which is not the most difficult thing to do, as you can program a pretty good fire effect on most light boards. I did like that the article provided examples of why a specific gel color would be better and why the designer chose it over the usual colors that are chosen. In my past experiences, green has always been a color that can really ruin a look if it is slightly too yellow. I like that the designer provided a green on the more blue end, but it is also a matter research that the designer needs to do in order to get the desired look. While this article was interesting, it did not provide any new information other than what seemed to be advertising for Rosco.
Although I didn't really find the content of this article to be particularly helpful due to its weird level of specificity to the particular show being discussed, I was drawn to the title of this article because it did resonate with me. I've noticed lately that a lot of times shows that are visually "simpler", if done right, can be more emotionally powerful than shows that have huge fancy spectacles. I guess the point this article is trying to make is that you should never underestimate the power of the resources you do have, as even a few pieces of gels if used thoughtfully can create great effects. I wish this article talked about things other than lighting/was more generic and applicable to other areas. As someone who's not a lighting designer, I didn't take away as much as I could have because although lighting is really important, the article wasn't really engaging.
Okay well this was a misleading title, to say the least. They most certainly were not using "the bare necessities" as they obviously had plenty of equipment and Rosco products. I think they could have really hit the point a lot better had they actually focused on a production that had very few resources but used Rosco products to bring it to life because that's all they had. That would be a great way to say, hey look! you can have a show with a really low budget but still have it be magical because Rosco is all you need. Instead they decided to bore (whoever they're writing this article for) with every single color and gobo code they could. I mean, really, I get your point. Rosco can make a show. But there's no need to be quite so heavy-handed about it. Cheers to the pun though, of course.
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