You are designing your next worship service and your worship leader requests doing something “exciting” with the lighting. You ask: “What exactly do you have in mind?” The leader responds: “Well, what if we have some lightning?”
The topic of creating “special effects” naturally falls to the lighting designer. This is more of a tradition due to the fact that lighting has the most flexibility in creating powerful images. This includes images of fire, explosions, lightning, smoke, haze, water, fog, and almost any other visual effect outside of costumes and scenery. (Notice I did not mention pyro effects. This is because pyrotechnics requires a license and special training so that you don’t accidentally blow anything up or set something on fire. Don’t ever agree to do pyrotechnics without this license and proper training.)
A lighting designer has some of the most elaborate tools to easily create these theatrical effects. Unlike when I was starting in the business 40 years ago when all I had in my toolbox were Lekos, Fresnels, Par Cans, (all controlled by manual light boards), we now have extremely sophisticated and powerful moving lights, incredibly bright color changing strobe lights, and lighting desks that can create complex multiple random strobe sequences. All this is a long way from flipping on and off circuit breakers to create lightning flashes (yes, that is how I used to do it).
Creating Emotion, Elusive and Obtainable
We now have individually controlled LED fixtures that can be bitmapped and controlled by video signals through media servers. We can create effects like slow moving sunsets across the cyc, or shifting light like clouds moving across the sun, or shifting moonlight through trees with shadows of branches and leaves moving across the stage. All this, plus the introduction of powerful video projectors into the world of lighting design, has expanded our abilities to create effects that were unthinkable 20 years ago.
Every flash of lightning is as distinctive as snowflakes. So you have great latitude here. Is the lightning meant to be scary? Is it far off in the distance and meant to be a looming threat? By asking these questions you will know what to use.
So getting back to the example in the first paragraph, you can create lightning in many ways. Yes, you could just flash the lights that you have, or you could use a dedicate strobe light. You could play lightning strikes in the video, or you could combine several of these techniques. How do you decide which option to use?
It all comes down to what you want your audience to “feel.” I always start out with a decision on what affect on the audience’s emotions you want to create, and then choose the right effect to inspire these emotions. Every flash of lightning is as distinctive as snowflakes. So you have great latitude here. Is the lightning meant to be scary? Is it far off in the distance and meant to be a looming threat? Is it from a passing storm, indicating that all threats are dissipating? By asking these questions you will know what to use, what speeds and intensities to flash, and how long the effect will last.
Video Enters In
There is another important thing to consider when creating special effects. And that is the advancement of video in our lighting designs. Video can create both literal and expressionistic images on the stage. It is crucial that you consider this when you create your special effects, especially if you are going to augment the video with stage lighting. Getting back to that lightning effect we just talked about, no matter how you create it, that lighting effect will not look 100% realistic. As an audience, we accept this because we know that these effects are being recreated theatrically. Again, it’s all about the mood and how we as human beings react to visual stimuli when watching a show. The lightning you created with those lighting fixtures and controller is inspired from the core essence of the realistic lightning you remember in your sense memory and in your research.... And it’s a theatricalized effect that will inspire that feeling in the audience. This is why theatre is such an effective art form.
If you mix in video of an actual lightning bolt, chances are that you will send contradicting visual effects to the audience, making the effect as a whole subconsciously confusing and ineffective. This is a common mistake that lighting and video artists make. This summer the video artist for one of the shows I designed used images of actual fire in the videos. I had to match the lighting effects I used to support the fire in the same style of the video. This meant a less expressionistic approach to the fire effect.
If you want to just see the beams of light in the atmosphere with no air movement, then you want to use a haze machine. Haze machines also use a liquid that is heated, but it produces a very fine mist that is almost invisible.
As this theatre suffers from electrical disruptions that have knocked out video in the past, we created an alternative cue stack that only used moving lights to fill in for the event that the video effects could not be used. In designing these alternative cues and effects, the director and I were amazed at how affective the cues were using only the conventional and moving light sources. I explained to the director and video designer my theory above, and I believed they had epiphanies about mixing video and stage lighting styles. Sometimes you have to see it to understand it.
Several years ago I designed the opera Rusalka for the Norwegian National Opera. We decided to create a world that appeared mostly underwater. To do this I incorporated some very sophisticated projection equipment to project water video on the floors and the walls of the set. I designed these projections to create the essence of the movement and color of the water, but they were mostly theatrical and expressionistic, and set to the tempo of the music. I also mixed this video movement in with the stage lighting (moving lights with two rotating gobos) to create this amazing three-dimensional world.
Using smoke, fog and haze
The lighting designer is also responsible for atmospheric effects. I must also say that you must be careful when specifying these effects for your designs. There are big differences between smoke, haze, and fog. Smoke is created by machines that employ a liquid that is heated and dispersed in the atmosphere. Smoke is dense and billows, not unlike smoke from a fire. When it passes through beams of light you usually see smoke movement in the air. Not unlike what you see from an actual fire.
If you want to just see the beams of light in the atmosphere with no air movement, then you want to use a haze machine. Haze machines also use a liquid that is heated, but it produces a very fine mist that is almost invisible. This is dispersed throughout the stage with the help of the HVAC and portable fans. Fog is a dense, low-hanging moving cloud. Think of the typical dry ice fog used in Swan Lake or other romantic ballets. It is usually created through dropping dry ice into a barrel of heated water. You can also create theatrical fog with modern machines that use CO2 in conjunction with their water-based chemical fluid.
And speaking of chemicals, be sure to do your research and only use smoke, haze and fog machines that have been approved by respected organizations such as Actors Equity. Most machines use fluid that is mixed from water and glycol. Some cheaper machines use chemicals that you do not wish to expose your performers or your audience to. To be sure, ask for the machine’s and the fluid’s MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet). This will help inform you if the fluid you are considering is safe.
Twenty-first-century technology has afforded the lighting designer with some amazing tools to create powerful special effects. The best way to explore these effects is through experimentation. Play with some of the pre-programmed chases in the lighting desk, try using the media server to fire up some sophisticated movement effects, and watch a lot of designs outside of your house of worship. You will be amazed at how creative you can be just focusing on the essence of the emotional reaction you want to create, and how those powerful tools now in your toolkit can create them. Enjoy!
David Martin Jacques is a professional lighting designer, architectural lighting consultant, and Head of Stage Design at Long Beach State University. His book, Introduction to the Musical Art of Stage Lighting Design, Fourth Edition, is available as an iBook on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/david-martin-jacques/id555554393?mt=11 and in soft cover at Amazon.com. David is also featured on the weekly podcast: Light Talk with The Lumen Brothers, available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play Music.
