(lack of) Subtlety in Lighting

Subtlety is perhaps the most forgotten element of lighting in the modern theater. Today with professional theater companies one style of lighting dominates the visual scene. It is agressive lighting designed to force a scene with strong, vibrant colors and hard directional angles. This style of lighting is undoubtably a hybridization of the entertainment lighting that evolv

ed with rock and roll crossed with the Jesus Christ Superstar to Wicked transition that took

over Broadway three and a half decades ago. With the advent of computerized control decks, moving lights, digital projectors, dichroic color mixing, and later LED fixtures, lighting designers embraced an over-the-top, intensity driven style designed to overpower the audience. This style of design can only be described as replacement lighting, where the natural emotions created by a production are forced out by a combination of sound and lighting.

Don't get me wrong, there is most certainly a place for elaborate, intense and overpowering lighting. The last scene of Next to Normal where the entire stage became engulfed in blinding light (created by over 300 250watt incandescent bulbs) was exactly what that produced needed at that moment, but not every scene, not every song needs to remind us of Oprah or CSI. What I am talking to is the tendency to homogenize the emotional response of an audience by locking down focus and creating a sensory overload. This is not theater.

Console Worlds: Tracking and Preset

One of the largest changes in moving from an entry level board, such as a SmartFade, Express, or Expression, to a full control deck such as an Ion, Eos or Congo, is a dramatic shift in the operation and edict of cue construction. It is absolutely essential to understand the differences not only in initial programing, but in terms of on-the-fly editing and scene tweaking.

Earlier and entry level consoles operate on what is known as a preset system. A preset systems works as the name implies, each cue is preset by the board operator and recorded on the console as complete values of every channel at that moment. Even though only one light may change intensity in a given cue, all data is recorded to the memory banks of the board. This style of construction means a board operator can manually build cues on the fly by raising or lowering individual sliders, submasters, or groups, and the recording functions as a snapshot of the exact state of the console at the moment record was pressed. A common problem for board operators and lighting designers centers around the fact that both ourselves and directors are picky. In a preset style board, changing the level of one light through a series of cues requires quickstepping through each cue with the selected fixture captured at the desired level. This can be tedious to say the least, and often impractical to accomplish in the middle of a rehearsal or cue-to-cue.

Enter the tracking console. Tracking consoles utilize a very different style of programing designed to work intuitively with a director and lighting designer. Tracking consoles attempt to mimic how a designer thinks about a show, in terms of what changes. When you hit record on a tracking console, the board does not save a comprehensive snapshot of the current scene. Instead, it records only what has changed! Additionally, it will carry on this change (as it did with all those beforehand) into any new cue you make. Additionally, any changes you make in previous cues will transfer forwards to preexisting cues, assuming the level is maintained.

What does that all mean? Let's say in Cue 1 you set a cyc blue to 45%, which continues until cue 50 when it drops to 20%. Now, say you want to change the initial 45% to 60%. On a conventional preset board you would go to cue 1, capture the channels at 60%, and quickstep through cues 1-50. On a tracking console, the instruction of where to set that level is saved in one place and one place only, cue 1. Because the intensity of the light does not change until cue 50, it has no recorded value for cues 2-49. In order to change the intensity of the cyc from 45% to 60%, the only cue you need to modify is cue 1.

But this isn't always good, maybe you only want cues 1-20 to reflect the 65% change. In that case, tracking consoles use something called block cues. Block cues effectively break the tracking, allowing you to start fresh. Some consoles allow you to set break cues on specific channels (I.E. set a break cue for just the cyc).

Tracking consoles offer tremendous advantages over traditional preset consoles in terms of versatility and adaptability, yet often have a high learning curve. Because of the nature of programing, they often lack the kind of direct-user control Express owners are accustomed to, and are used less in live-creation settings.