Lighting Design

Lighting Design – At Home Lab Video

In my Lighting Design lab, I experimented with lights and shadows to represent the mood/feeling that a music piece gave me – which was trolls and monster dancing and chilling at a pub.  The lightings that I used in the Lighting Design are: LED color lights, flashlights, and green laser point lights. When planning, I tried to use small figures and shine a front light on them to make shadows move on the cyclorama. Additionally, I attempted to coordinate the tempo with the beat of the music. Luckily, my attempts were a success.

How did your thinking about lighting has changed since you started exploring lighting with focus? How did you view lighting and the use of lighting before and now after your explorations, what is your new knowledge or insight?

When I first started with the lighting unit, I used to think that lights were only used to give mood to the overall scene, or simply, just show the shadows of the setting.

After I defined the lighting design vocabularies and experimented with the virtual lighting lab, virtual color lab, and virtual gobo lab, I acquired new understandings; Cycloramas are used as a projector “screen” on stage, and gobo patterns block out the light, to give a certain shape on stage in which may resemble branches sticking out in the woods, or a setting where the sunlight is coming through the window.

Furthermore, by finding various light designs from the internet and by exploring with light designs at home, I was able to understand the usage of shadows. For instance, shadows could be used as a representation of the character’s memory. On the other hand, shadows could be used to represent a still object in movement, just like in my video above, I used flashlights onto the figures in an attempt to resemble the figures dancing.

After multiple explorations done on light designs, now I think that light is not just about the representation of the mood or the feeling of the scene, but also a story telling tool that helps the audience to interpret better about what is happening. Lights can be used to emphasize, hide, and highlight objects, as well as showing movement of still objects.