R.A.V.E - Episode 3 - The 4 Disciplines of AV Series: Part 2 - What You Need to Know About Stage Lighting

This episode is the second in a 4-part series called The 4 Disciplines of AV. Part 2 is all about stage lighting, or should I say, what you need to know about stage lighting.

Transcript

RAVE Ep 3 - FINAL - Podcast - 4 Disciplines Series - What You Need to Know About Stage Lighting

Stephen: [00:00:00] Hello fellow humans. This is Rave, the podcast where we are training tomorrow's AV professionals with excellence and integrity. I'm your host, Stephen Verner, and we are back for another exciting episode. This is episode number three. Woo-hoo. Uh, in our first episode, we talked, uh, about this podcast. What's it all about?

What's the goal of this podcast? So, the goal of this podcast is to train and teach. People who want to become professionals in the audio visual industry or live event industry, the essentials of what they need to know to be successful. By no means is this going to be [00:01:00] comprehensive. It's meant to simply introduce people to the right concepts and the right ideas in the point them in the right direction.

So in our second episode. We dove headlong into a four-part series that I'm calling the Four Disciplines of av. And of course, no offense to all the other disciplines within the audio visual world, but I feel like these are the four main ones where you need to know something about and, and. Where your job will probably land under one of these four headings.

So the four disciplines are audio stage, lighting, video, and stage rigging. So we covered the first one in episode number two. We called that what you need to know about audio, where I exposed you to, uh, some of the basic concepts of good professional audio. And so we're gonna take part two of that series, episode [00:02:00] three, and we're gonna talk about what I feel like are the essential concepts that you need to be familiar with if you're going into stage lighting.

So without further ado, we're gonna dive right in. And the first concept that I want to talk about is the concept of control. How do you make the lights do what you want them to do while you're sitting behind this console, they call it. And the way we control lights now is through a signal called DMX Digital Multiplex.

So a little history here. So as. Theater developed throughout cultures and throughout the centuries. We went from using, you know, uh, the technology we had at hand were candlelight. We moved, uh, in the 20th century from candlelight into gaslighting. Uh, gas lighting was extremely unsafe for theaters. A lot of theaters burned down.

[00:03:00] Um. And then with the development, uh, in discovery, electricity is, uh, we were using, uh, dim Dimable fixtures, uh, that had a bulb inside now. Uh, and so we're still using fixtures like that. Um. But the need to control those, um, and to make those lights do things, uh, at the right timing and to fade up at a certain time and to fade down at a certain time and to go to a certain intensity or to track from one cue to the next scene, uh, became extremely important.

And there were all kinds of developments on the control console, uh, side of things. Um, but the protocol that was being used. Was limited. So, uh, we get into the seventies and we have a, a protocol called LMX, but LMX was, uh, kind of limited. Uh, there were [00:04:00] only 128 channels available. Um, and at the time, no one could have ever conceived that you would need more than 128 lighting fixtures for, um, for a stage play or a live event.

Um, but here we are. And so, uh, the good folks at U-S-I-T-T, which stands for United States Institute of Theater Technology, it's a, it's a wonderful organization. Um, they got together with manufacturers and with, uh, leading mines and, um, stage lining, and they said, we need to come up with some sort of agreed upon protocol so that, uh, we can standardize this.

So the protocol that they came up with and standardized is DMX five 12. So we jumped from LMX with 128 channels to DMX with 512 channels. So that was already a huge win. And so we're still using DMX to this day. And so [00:05:00] that, uh, came about in the mid eighties, I think around 86, 87. And so, uh, DMX is is a simple eight bit depth, uh, signal that is generated, uh, from a control console.

It's sent out across an XLR style, uh, wire, a shielded wire. And, uh, for conventional fixture control, it goes to a, a hub or control module within a di rack, and then that demo rack, um, speaks to or talks to the individual dimers and, uh, tells the lights what to do and when to do it. Um, and uh, also with LED fixtures and moving lights and things like that, those dimmers are already built into those individual fixtures.

So the DMX line just went straight from the board into that light, outta the first light into the next, and so on and so forth. So being familiar with DMX and how it, [00:06:00] uh, works and what it's all about is, uh, very, very important. Um, so I mentioned the 500. 12 channels. So I like to use the concept of like, in the IT world we have IP addresses.

So your computer sits on a network, it has a specific address that lets that network know, um, what device is connected to it and where it is located so that it can, uh, control the information that you're trying to send to other people and what information other people were trying, uh, to send to you. So.

Uh, DMX works, uh, a lot, uh, like that. It has 512 individual addresses. They're called to give out. So each one of those addresses controls a parameter of the light. So if we're talking about just conventional lights, conventional light can, uh. Be brought up in intensity [00:07:00] and it can dim an intensity. So therefore only one control channel out of the DMX uh, universe, we call it, is used per lighting fixture.

So you could have up to 512 individual lights connected to one universe of 512 channel DMX. But as lighting fixtures have become more and more complex, uh, the more parameters that a light has to control, that fixture needs more DMX channels available to it. So, uh. Let's go to our next category of lights is LEDs.

So LEDs came onto the market and they were mainly red, green, and blue. So the simplest, um, LED light had three channels, so it had a control channel for red intensity control, channel for green intensity, and a controlled channel for blue intensity. And then as moving lights come onto the [00:08:00] scene, now we can move the light.

So we need to pan the light side to side. We need to tilt the light up and down. Um, we also have some color control and color mixing. We have gobos or images that are in those moving lights. Every one of those parameters takes one or more. DMX channels. So we've moved from a single light needing 1D MX channel to, uh, one light needing three or more, um, channels.

You can see how a, a standard lighting rig now can just eat up hundreds, if not thousands of channels of DMX, depending on the complexity of the lighting fixtures, uh, that you're trying to control. So with DMX, uh, we've had, uh, two new technologies, uh, that are born out of DMX that allow multiple universes of DMX to be sent, uh, out of the console across one wire.

So in the old days, we had, in the olden [00:09:00] times, um, uh, a board would have multiple DMX outputs, so you'd have to run an individual cable. Out of that output to access that universe of DMX. So some of the bigger consoles I worked on had four, oh my gosh, four universes of DMX. That was unheard of to have over 2000 channels of lighting.

Um. So, but now with Artnet and SACN, it allows, uh, to package those DMX um, signals and you can send multitudes of universes down one CAT five ethernet cable, CAT six. It's more the conventional now, but you get what I'm saying. And so again, DMX is just a standardized protocol for how we control lights.

It's normally generated out of a console, so you think of the signal path coming out of the, uh, console and into either the [00:10:00] brain, the part that is talking to the dimmers in a rack, or it goes to an individual light, a mover, or an LED fixture. So, and that's the first concept. Uh, the next concept is I think you need to be familiar with all the different basic types of fixtures out there and what their uses are.

So I've already mentioned them, and so we will just go through them rather quickly as we have conventional fixtures, LED fixtures. And moving lights. So going back to conventional fixtures, they break up into what I call families. So, uh, the first style of fixture you'll see and probably have seen is the park can, and it's just a simple light that literally looks like a big coffee can with a bulb at the end.

It looks like it came out of the headlight of my parents' Volkswagen VW Beetle. But still a very effective light. It's considered a wash light because it's just meant to spray light onto the stage. It's not very focusable unless you put some attachments at the end of the light, and we can talk [00:11:00] about that later.

But nevertheless, you're gonna see park hands. Uh, the next style of light you'll see maybe less frequently in live entertainment versus like in the theater, is a fennell light, uh, a fennell. Uh, the lens, the best, uh, real world application I can give you is if you've ever toured a lighthouse. So I'm from Georgia.

I've toured, uh, TBE Island, uh, lighthouse. If you look at the lenses or the glass that's cut around all sides of that, uh, lighting fixture at the top of a, a lighthouse, those are for now lenses. So a lens is trying to mimic the ellipsoidal nature or the elliptical nature of your eyeball. And so what happens is they've cut concentric circles starting from the center of that glass lens, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

So what happens is when that light beam shines through that piece of glass is it disperses that light beam [00:12:00] beautifully, so it spreads that pattern out. So for nails, make for beautiful. Beautiful wash lights. So you'll see a lot of Fne lights, uh, used in theater, uh, specifically and also in broadcast, uh, television and um, uh, movie in the movie world.

And then the last type of fixture that you'll probably see the most of is an ellipsoidal. So. This particular, uh, lighting, uh, fixture, conventional lighting fixture, um, it is stands out in that it's more focusable. So it has four metal shutters, uh, two on the each side and two, two on the top, one on the bottom.

And this is allows you to slide those shutters manually in front of the light beam and cut it off. And so this helps if we want to really focus the light in a particular area of stage, but we don't want it to bleed, say, onto a curtain, or we [00:13:00] don't want it to bleed down into the orchestra pit or, uh, any other number of things.

Uh, the other thing that's unique about the ellipsoidal light, uh, is that you can drop a gobo or a metal, sometimes glass made, um, circle that has a, um, pattern cut or etched into it. And as the light beam travels through that gobo, it, uh, projects that steel image on wherever you want it to go. Another feature that makes Ellipsoidal lights unique is the, uh, the interchangeable lenses.

So the lenses give us the ability to change the distance of where that light is hung in relationship to what you're trying to light. So, uh, the closer that light is to, um, the. Person or thing that we're trying to light. Um, the more curve that ellipse Soto needs to have to keep that [00:14:00] circle on the um. On the floor or whatever object you're trying to hit, uh, small.

So you're gonna see a more curve. So a 50 degree lens might be used as you move further away. You might see a 36 degree lens, or even a 26 degree and a 19. Those, or you know, 19, 26 and 36 are the ones that I see the most in theater. Uh, but you also have. 14 degree, which I, I've seen very rarely. Not sure why.

Um, but then, um, especially if we are projecting patterns from a long distance, um, uh, we might use a 10 degree lens and a five degree lens. So these lenses. Are larger, but they have much less curvature to them to keep that, uh, image smaller. Um, so we use, uh, Pythagorean Theorem, um, you know, uh, we're trying to hang that light.

You [00:15:00] know, uh, in, at an angle so that it hits an object or a person properly. We'll talk some more about that. But distance plays, um, a role in the use of conventional fixtures. So then for every type of conventional fixture that we just listed, there's an LED equivalent. Um, less for now, as I see, but many, many LED.

Uh, pars and, uh, many, many LED Ellipsoidals. So we started out with just red, green and blue diodes on most LEDs. Um, it was pretty hard to mix those three colors together to get a true, nice, beautiful, warm white. So as technology has increased. We have the advent of warm white LEDs that will literally mimic the color, the color temperature.

And we'll talk some more about that concept later of that beautiful warm, uh, halogen light that we're so used to seeing coming out of conventional fixtures. And it'll [00:16:00] also have cool white LEDs as well that mimic, um, the, the cooler or more blue, uh, white light that we see maybe coming out of. Uh, other styles of like moving lights and things like that.

So with moving lights, um, we, they basically break down into, uh, two categories. All of them move, uh, but we're gonna have ones that are more wash focused and some that are more spot focused. So what a lot of manufacturers will do. Because they'll develop, you know, one brand model of light that basically does the same thing and one will have more color mixing capability.

So it'll use, you know, red, green, and blue. To mix color, it's, and um, or sometimes cyan, magenta, yellow is another way we can color mix to get, uh, all the colors of the rainbow. Um, or it'll be spot based. And so, um, it'll have more wheels inside that have gobos. Uh. Or patterns that [00:17:00] will spin around. Um, and everything inside of a moving light is controlled by small little electric motors.

And, and so then we also, uh, go further into the iteration of a lot of moving lights that are on the market now are LED based lamps. The LED just lasts a lot longer. Um, you can u consume a lot less electricity and still get a lot of luminosity on the stage. Now we do have. You know, uh, some moving lights, especially the, the larger ones used in concerts and things like that, uh, are, are, um, tungsten based.

Um, so that they have to get a signal from the board to actually, uh. Turn the lamp on or to strike it almost like a match. Uh, I think about it that way. Um, but that are your three different big fixture types. You have conventional fixtures, LED fixtures and moving light fixtures, and they all have their various uses.

[00:18:00] Uses. So depending on how simple a rig is or how complex a rig is, you're going to be exposed to all these different types of fixtures. So it's nice to know at least what. They're called and what family they fall into, and you can kind of guess when you see a pile of fixtures. And you're putting up a rig, which ones are gonna end up being used for wash light and which ones are gonna be used for spots and things like that.

Now, ellipsoidal lights can do the work of a par can and a, um, a Forne and Pars and Fornes can do the work of an ellipsoidal. Maybe not quite as well. There are different attachments you can put on the end of a park and or a fennell. We call it a top hat. It's just an open snout that increases the barrel of and gives it some focus.

Um. You can also use what we call barn doors that slot into where we put the gel. We used to put the gel lens at the end of the lighting fixture that will help to shape the beam. But [00:19:00] again, those lights are trying to do what an ellipsoidal can do so much better. And another thing the newer ellipsoidal can do is the barrel can rotate.

A certain amount so that if the light has to be hung at a weird angle or you're trying to get a, a shredder cut that just is not, uh, making sense, you can rotate that barrel and get that cut just right on at the angle that you need it to be. So, uh, our, we've already, uh, talked about here in the first, uh, 20 minutes, uh, control signal and all the different families of fixture types.

And then I've alluded to this next concept. So concept number five is, uh, the white balancing. So, uh. Light is a frequency that moves through the air. It's set much higher, so our eyes see it instead of our ears hearing it. And so, uh, we measured that on the, in terms of its temperature. [00:20:00] Uh, and we use the Kelvin, um, temperature scale.

So, uh, with a warm light that we're used to seeing. Um, it falls on the lower side of the Kelvin scale or 3,200 degrees Kelvin Lights that look more blue, uh, intent are gonna fall on the higher end of the Kelvin scale or at 5,600 degrees Kelvin. And so. White balancing then is this concept of matching, uh, the white output of a light.

So a lot of LED fixtures are going to, uh, mimic more of that 5,600 degree cool white look. And, um, but yet again, like I said, we have LED, uh, diodes that will mimic the 3,000, the 3,200 degree warm white. Um, excuse me as well. Um. So, but when we're working with [00:21:00] videographers and things like that, we have to pick a standard, so the camera aperture, the lens and everything wants to act like the human eyeball.

And so we have to pick a standard if we have, you know, some fixtures that are putting out more about 3,200. We have some fixtures that are putting out more 5,600. Um, the camera is not gonna know how to balance all its other colors. So normally, uh, someone will get up with a big sheet or a white, um, uh, yeah, just a big white sheet.

And there are things that people will hold up, they'll stand where the light is being focused, and then they'll take a measurement, um, and then you can use. Uh, gel to correct. In the old days we used physical gel. Now, uh, we have, you know, uh, color correction within the fixtures that mimic these gel colors.

So we can take a warm white and balance it more towards the blue so we can use color, temperature, blue. Vice versa. We can take [00:22:00] one that's more on the blue side and we can make it look more warm. So we use CTO or color temperature, orange. So that's just a little bit about, uh, white balancing, um, and the need to, you know, kind of pick a standard and make sure that you're.

Matching your colors. Uh, it'll really help your audience as well, even if you're not videoing, um, to pick a standard in theater. We'd lean a little bit more towards the warm white, uh, just historically. And then, um, production like, uh, TV and things like that, that lean a little bit more towards the 5,600.

But these things have, um. Kind of converged a little bit. So, um, you just need to be able to speak to all the people who are working on a particular event to make sure that you're all literally on the same page about, um, what color temperature you're gonna use.

So now I want to talk about the concept of patching a [00:23:00] console. So we talked about DMX. Now we want to talk about how that console actually, um, speaks to those lights. So we talked about how a light has to live at a particular DMX. Location and it has to have a specific address. So we call that process patching.

So in the console it's going to have channels, and so you want to assign a dimmer or a DMX address to, uh, be controlled by a certain channel. So the easiest way to patch a console is what we call one-to-one. And this. Concept works in audio as well, where the first channel on the board is the first channel on stage.

We're talking about audio, and it's the same in lighting, is that the first channel on the board is connected to, uh, dimmer number one or, uh, the fixture that has D image. DMX address, number one. Um, but that's not always the case. Um, most of the time we're gonna have to do [00:24:00] custom patching just because the way the dimmers, uh, get laid out in the hall.

It doesn't make sense. So if the first place you're trying to hit, um. Uh, the closest dimmer that you need to plug that line into is, say, channel or dimmer 36. Then channel one or Dimmer 30, next 36, sorry, needs to be patched in, uh, to be controlled by channel one. So you want to do this from your perspective as the one controlling the board.

And normally I work from left to right and from the front part of the stage to the back part of the stage. Or in theater we call that downstage to upstage. Or from the house perspective, or where the audience sits versus the stage perspective. So every console is gonna do this, um, a little bit differently, but also a lot the same.

So it'll have a certain number of channels that are available, and then you're gonna have a certain number of fixtures and you're gonna have to figure out [00:25:00] how to make those fixtures, um, uh, fit into your console. I know when I have more lights than channels, depending on what I'm using those, uh, lights for, I can set, uh, a group of those lights to the same DMX channels.

So effectively, when I move that channel up on the board, the board, uh, sees just one lighting fixture, no matter how many are connected. So, uh. A real world use case would be like uplighting behind a stage. So if I have, let's say eight LED pars behind a stage and I don't have a whole lot of channels to give out, and all of those lights are always gonna be the same color I could.

And let's say that they're three channel RGB, uh, LEDs, I could just assign DMX channel number one. To all eight of those lights. So when I pull up channel number one, red is gonna come up on all eight of those lights, and then when I [00:26:00] pull up Channel two, green is gonna come up on all of those lights and when I pull up Channel three, blue is gonna come up on all eight of those lights.

So that's a way to sort of get around, uh, the. Problem of having too many lights for not enough channels, but when you have a bigger console, you don't really have to worry about that, and you want to be able to control each individual light. So each light could be its own custom color, so on and so forth.

So each again, manufacturer, uh, does this, um, a little bit differently, but a lot the same. The concept is the same. So, um, at the theater where I'm technical director, we own, uh, an ETC console and ETC. You'll see in a lot of theaters, electronic theater controls is the name of the company. They've been making consoles for a long time.

You'll see Strand, you're gonna see a lot of other names and consoles [00:27:00] out there. Um, you're gonna probably have heard of the hog, uh, the Jans Vista, uh, the Grand Ma, uh, by MA Lighting. Some people call it the grandma. Um, you're gonna see all these different types of consoles out there, but the concept of patching is similar in all of these, uh, consoles.

So, uh, along in that line of patching is understand the different concepts of what a dimmer number, a channel number, and a fixture number are. So again, when I was explaining patching, you probably caught onto the fact that a dimmer number is, is the, uh, the, the dimmer's location. In your particular rig where it's located in your theater or venue.

So Dimmer one refers to the first dimmer in the rack, uh, in your building. Um, but the channel number is where you want to [00:28:00] patch it into your board so that when, uh. Say you plug that light into Dimmer 36. As we mentioned before, uh, dimmer 36, whatever light is plugged into that is controlled by channel one on your board so that when you move that fader up or you punch that number in and tell it to go to a certain, um, intensity, um, channel one is gonna come up and the dimmer number and the channel number can match, but not necessarily, it's not necessary for those numbers to match.

So therefore we have this grid or this patch that gets created. Fixture numbers, uh, work in my mind like channel numbers. But again, when we're talking about fixtures that have multiple channels of DMX to control different parameters, I switch to this terminology of fixture numbers. So let's just stick with our concept of, you know, a three channel, uh, LED light.

Um, instead of calling that light, you know, uh, one, two, three, I'm gonna call that fixture one, [00:29:00] you know, fixture two, fixture three, fixture four. So if we have those eight LED, pars again, and they're all three channels, a piece, three times, uh, eight is 24 is going to eat up 24 channels, uh, of DMX. So each of those, uh.

Uh, lights is gonna have a starting DMX address and so, but I'm gonna call them fixture one, fixture two, fixture three, so on and so forth. Up to fixture eight. So fixture one, its address is gonna be starting on one, so it'll be take up channels one, two, and three. Fixture two will start at four. It'll take up channels four.

Five and six. Channel three will start on channel seven, and it'll take up seven, eight, and nine, so on and so forth until we've patched all of those lights in. So it's just a, a changing of the terminology. It's still the channel I use when I'm talking about an individual. Light that only, uh, a conventional [00:30:00] light that I'm only controlling the dimming of the light and no other parameters when I'm moving towards like LED lights or moving lights that have multiple, uh, DMX channels controlling multiple parameters.

I change the terminology to fixture in my head and it just helps me when I'm referring to those lights in my rig and in my. Patch to think about them that way because that's the way you're gonna call those, uh, fixtures up as you are programming. So another concept here that we've already mentioned just a little bit is power distribution.

So, uh, and load balancing. So a lot of times, unless you're going to set up for a special event outdoors or in a, um, a rentable venue, uh, the power distribution is going to be, uh, more or less semi-permanent to the building. And so those are gonna have already been installed and distributed out into different locations.

[00:31:00] So, uh, you know, uh, in my theater we have a rack of 96 dimers, and those dim dimers are distributed across, uh, all various places where those fixtures can be hung throughout, uh, the theater. Um, so, uh, the power is distributed in that way. Um. With power distribution. Also the idea of load balancing. So in the United States we use, um, you know, uh, 120 volt, uh, uh, system.

In that 120 volts, most circuits are gonna be 20 amps. A 20 amp circuit can handle a 2,400 watt load. So, uh, with, say a conventional ellipsoidal, uh, now, uh, burns at about 575 watts, uh, per lamp or per fixture. So if we have four of those, that works out to about 2300 watts. So if you do the math, uh, in theory, [00:32:00] those four fixtures could all, um, con be controlled or plugged in, uh, to one 20 amp circuit.

Um, but. We use this concept of, uh, rolling off, uh, and making headroom. We roll off 20% of the power, so we roll off about 480 of those 2,400 watts, which puts us at about 1,920. Watts Max, which brings our, uh, our amp draw down to around 16 amps. Uh, the reason we do that is we're planning on, if we're planning on having all of those lights on at a hundred percent max for a sustained period of time, a.

That load is gonna be right at the max of that breaker, which is made basically to break the circuit when it senses that it could become dangerous and cause a fire. So you're gonna be in danger of throwing that, that breaker. So what we do [00:33:00] is we roll off, or we just say, well, let's just do three of those 570 watt uh, fixtures, which is 1,675 watts.

If I'm doing the math right in my head. And then that puts us way below that 2,400 watts that a 20 amp circuit can handle. And then we're gonna be nowhere near, even if all three of those lights were running at a hundred percent for the entire show, we're gonna be nowhere near maxing out, uh, the capacity of that circuit breaker.

And you're not gonna see your lights go dark. Now, sometimes you're gonna be in a situation where you're using these, uh, dimmer packs to plug into wall power. Um, and instead of a, a circuit breaker, you know, in a panel, they're gonna have a fast blow fuse of a certain, uh, rating. So a lot of the cheaper packs that I've used, they'll, they'll have, you know, it'll be advertised as a four channel dimmer, you know, 2,400 watts, you know, uh, 600 watts per [00:34:00] channel.

And it's the same concept though. If you plug in 4 575 watt, uh. Lamps to, uh, each one of those to, uh, a circuit or to, sorry, to a channel that can only handle 600 watts. Then we're breaking that, um, uh, 80%, uh, rule already. And what's gonna happen is if those lights stay on, it constant is it's gonna blow that fuse and that dimmer pack's gonna go out and you're gonna lose control of those four, four lights.

So I use the same idea of load balancing by spreading out, you know, the. Uh, draw of electricity on my dimmer packs, and this becomes. Important as well. With LED lights, a lot of LED lights will allow you to loop the power from one fixture to another. So the first light needs to be plugged into power and then you just loop the power out.

And even though LED lights on a on the hall put out more luminosity [00:35:00] and they have less power draw or consumption. In amperage, uh, there is a maximum, which how many you can loop. So you need to read the documentation of the light. So if the light, you know, draws, you know, three amps, you know, we need to use the same, same rule.

You know, we don't want to go over, uh, 16 amps. So how many of those fixtures could we put? Probably five. On the same circuit, whether we're looping it straight out or we're, we're plugging those directly into like a power strip that goes back to a outlet. Um. We don't want to go over that 16 amps of a 20 amp circuit.

Um, so, uh, another, uh, part of lighting that I want to talk about. So again, we go super deep into all these concepts. I'm just trying to touch on some of these, um, so that you just hear these terms and it's not the first time when you get on the job site that you've heard these terms and you can go out and go deeper [00:36:00] on these.

And again, I hope to be able to. Post about some of these things on all my various social media, uh, channels, uh, to sort of drive home the point on some of these. So, uh, another concept is color mixing and there's all kinds of books and, um, things out. Um. On the market for you to learn how to do color mixing.

Um, you know, basic color mixing, you know, red, green and blue. I mentioned cyan, magenta in yellow. If you come from a print or graphics world, that's gonna make a lot of sense to you because it's similar concept if you come from a painting background or artistic background. That's gonna make a lot of sense.

Um, with. Conventional lights, we used to have gel, so it was a piece of gel or plastic, um, that was, um, dyed or made to be a certain color. And literally when you put in that piece of gel in front of the beam of the light, it. It would filter out certain [00:37:00] wavelengths to create that color. So we had what we called swatch books that looked a lot like paint swatches, but they were gel swatches and they're different companies out there that still make gel Roscoe and Gamma and different companies.

But a lot of these, uh, consoles now will mimic these colors. You know, uh, I still remember a lot of colors that I use, uh, to this day by the Roscoe. Number. One of my favorite colors is a Roscoe 46. I hope I'm not gonna get in trouble for, uh, mentioning that. I think it's like a magenta color, but, or a hot pink kind of color.

I'm not sure the exact name. Um. But it looks great. Uh, anyway, color mixing a very important concept to learn. You know, most colors fall into two major categories, uh, warm colors and cool colors. So if you think about your rainbow, you know, your reds, your oranges, and your yellows, things like that. We're gonna be more on the warm [00:38:00] side of color mixing.

And like your greens, blues, uh, purple lavenders, things like that are gonna end up being on the cool side. So depending on what emotion or, um, the energy on the stage and what you're trying to emphasize, uh, you can do color association, uh, like that. Um, and I was going over this concept with, um, one of our technicians at the theater, YMTD.

Just yesterday. And, you know, reminding her that even culturally our IC colors slightly different. And then also we call things different by different names. And then also, uh, the other, uh, thing I wanted to mention about, uh, color mixing is that our brains associate different colors with different emotions.

So, um, it's a fascinating, fascinating topic to, uh, deep dive on. Uh, so I'd encourage you to do that. So another [00:39:00] concept, and I want to go through these last couple of months is, uh, hey, sorry about that folks. Um, I had a little technical trouble where my, um, software just. Stop the recording. So, uh, let's finish up here.

So we were talking about, uh, angles and positions. So the last couple of concepts I just want to touch on because I want to keep this podcast under a certain amount of time. Um, being considerate of you. If you're consuming this in your drive time or on your lunch break. So is, uh, scene creation. So, um, you know.

I've spent a lot of time in the lighting world. I've done lighting for everything from, you know, rock and roll and r and b music, to conventions, to business meetings, to dance to, you name it. And so all of those different types of live events, we use the same technology, um, but they have [00:40:00] different lighting needs.

And so we really want to be paying attention to the client and what they're asking, um, us for, uh, scene creation can be a really fun and exciting part of lighting and the design part of lighting or it could be extremely frustrating. So this is where I find that your use of people skills is super important.

You can either have a frustrating time where you continue to, um. Expect a client to talk in your terminology, or you can be a really good listener. And when they say, I don't know, that backdrop looks angry, can you make the guy not look angry? You can take that and interpret it to your language. Uh, and say, well, is it too red?

Or, um, what would you like for me to do to make it less angry? And, you know, understanding that our clients may [00:41:00] not come from the world that we come from. And so be patient with people, you know, it's can be a fun and exciting thing to collaborate with people and create. Visual effects on stage. To me, it's one of the most visceral parts of being a part of the live entertainment industry.

There are times that just sheer serendipity has taken over and I might boot the console up and you know, I bring up a light and the angle just catches me and I go, oh, I'm gonna build a whole scene off that. That angle is just fantastic. Um, or, you know, a color may catch me. And it may be a memory. I had a friend who's, uh, since passed and gone on to be with God, but he, I was training him in lining many years ago, and he would dream of colors and he would come into the church, the, uh, church where I worked, and he would.

Tell me about his dream. And I would try to stand behind the console and hit the color that he [00:42:00] was telling me. And sometimes I would get frustrated. I'd be like, Hey, Herman, why don't you just come stand by the console and, and get that color? And he would do it. And I'd be like, well, that's the same color I just had.

But he, it was like looking at paint. Chips with your spouse, right? It's like, no, how many shades of beige can there be? Um, but it's fascinating and, and this is one of the areas of lighting that just gives me so much joy, is to be able to, to hit the expectations of the person and to collaborate with other people to create these beautiful moments on stage that just.

Take people's breath away or excite them or move them, or, um, I've correctly interpreted the artistic vision of a artistic director or a choreographer or even a CEO. Uh, that just gives me a great deal of satisfaction. And if you're wired viscerally, like that lighting design and, and control will, [00:43:00] um, will continue to fascinate you.

Uh, last two things I want to mention here is, uh, going back behind that console is we have channels that are the most basic way to control one individual light. But when we, uh, put more, uh. Channels together, we can use one fader to control a multitude of lights. That's called a sub master. Um, we can also use what's called a group.

So many times what I'm doing when I lay my console out, let's say I have, you know, lights that are gonna hit people's face. So the front light, maybe I've got what we call hair light or light that is shining from behind and hidden off the, uh, people's shoulders. Maybe I have down light that's washing.

Satellite that's washing. And so I'll create different groups and I'll also write these groups as, uh, corresponding sub masters. So if sub master one is gonna be [00:44:00] all of my house lights, then I'll also make group one all of my house lights. It's just, uh, a way to organize yourself so that if you are in a panic or you need to grab a certain zone of lights for a.

Specific reason, uh, in a show live, you can manually pull those lights up quickly. I like putting things on sub masters because I like to the tactile feel of moving a fader up and down and using my eyes and my body at the same time to nail the timing perfectly as someone's entering or exiting the stage.

Something like that. So the last concept, just to mention, and you can go deep dive on this, is M'S. Law. And so if you're deep into the electrical side of things, um, this goes back to the concept of where we were talking about power distribution and load balancing. So if that sciency part doesn't really fascinate you, but you want to do more of the creation, um.[00:45:00] 

The way things worked for me is to, to the, the more I learned about the science and I got better at what the fixtures were, their uses, how to handle those fixtures, how to repair those fixtures, how to hang those fixtures, how to aim those fixtures, the closer how to cable those fixtures and address those fixtures.

The closer I got to sitting behind that console. I have made the observation that many of the people that I'm training now, and especially lighting and audio, they're starting the process in reverse From where I started so many years ago. You would never dare to sit even near someone that was controlling an audio console or lighting console until you graduated.

To that, right? And that meant probably hundreds of punishing hours of being a, a, a lacky tech, you know, rolling cable and say, Hey, go move that light from here to here, or climb that ladder and go move this over. Or Hey, go replace this cable over here. [00:46:00] And we used to call people who sit behind consoles like that, but don't do all the heavy lifting, the white gloves 'cause they don't get their hands dirty.

But what I've learned as I've gotten older is that a lot of those people have put in the time, and although they're not doing it on the gig that you're working, don't assume that they've never done it before. Um, and also just don't be an a-hole. You know, I try to be very kind and humble to people, even though I've been doing this for a very long time.

Longer than I would like to admit. Um. But these are just 14 concepts that I feel like are super important. So I'm just gonna list them off real quick as we're wrapping up. Understanding DMX, uh, what it is and what it's used for. The different types of conventional fixtures, their types and their uses, their LED equivalents that mimic conventional fixtures in their uses.

Moving lights and their uses, the fact that they fall into two major categories of wash lights and [00:47:00] spotlights. Uh, the concept of white balancing and why that is so important, how to patch a console. The difference between dimmer numbers, channel numbers, fixture numbers, sub masters and groups and their uses.

How we lay out power, uh, so that we don't, uh, overload circuits and we load balance the electricity, uh, back into design, the color mixing the angles and positions of which we locate the lights, how we sit down and we, uh, listen to people and create scenes. And knowing a little bit about homes law, and I mentioned, I'll throw this one in as a bonus, a little bit about Pythagorean and Theorem, because knowing, uh, the distance.

And the angle, uh, lets us know how big that circle is gonna be. There's also all kind of apps that will help you, uh, uh, get close to those, uh, calculations as well. Um, so I'm gonna try to link some of those things. And, uh, the description, I'm gonna try to be posting [00:48:00] about some of those. These, uh, concepts that we've mentioned throughout the week, so as to further emphasize them.

And then if you want to interact with me and ask me specific questions, I'll be happy to receive your emails at rave the podcast@gmail.com. And I'll do my very best, uh, to, uh, answer all your questions. I love interacting with people and very gregarious, as well as I love the technical side of things, but I love the intersection between technology.

And, and beauty and artistic creation, and I love collaborating with people. So I thank you for sticking around. If you've stuck around these last 48 minutes, I hope that the information that I've shared you find useful, and if it hasn't been useful to you and you stuck around this long, kudos to you. If you think of someone in your world, your sphere that could benefit from this information, please recommend and share the link to this podcast.

I'm your host, Stephen Vernon. This has been Rave, the podcast where we are training tomorrow's AV [00:49:00] professionals with excellence and integrity. We'll be back next week with another episode. Thank you so much, my fellow humans.