[SML] Gel colors for Sweeney Todd

Fri Apr 21 17:26:12 UTC 2017

My two cents...

If you're using gel, I have found that directors tend to respond positively to colors like Steel Blue, or even Full CTB to be "harsh", especially if you can keep some sort of warm white reference in your lighting... if you stay in the cool "harsh" pallet too long, our eyes will adjust, and we will think it's normal.  

Alternatively, using fluorescent or LED, you can lower CRI in select scenes.  In LED, you limit the number of colors being mixed to make your color, to thereby limit the color rendition (lower CRI).  This makes things kind of blur together, which is what the Director may be asking for when they say that they want it to look muddy.  However, you should use this sparingly, as it will have weird and possibly undesirable effects on all sorts of surfaces, which will infuriate your scenic and costume departments, and you need to have higher CRI (either better mixed color, or incandescent sources) to make this an intentional choice... or else it just looks like bad lighting.

HTH,
-Ford
-----Original Message-----
From: Stagecraft [mailto:stagecraft-bounces at theatrical.net] On Behalf Of illuminati500 via Stagecraft
Sent: Friday, April 21, 2017 12:26 PM
To: slitterst at gmail.com; Stagecraft Mailing List
Cc: illuminati500
Subject: Re: [SML] Gel colors for Sweeney Todd

I think that your director says “harsh” but you use the words “Fleet Street Murky” which are two different things really. To me harsh means point source lighting on the one hand to give hard shadows and not much light or alternatively, a completely even and unremitting wash such as you might get from a bank of fluorescent strips. Murky, on the other hand is dark and  monochromatic which you might get from some SOX low pressure sodium lights. You get that genuine street lights effect. As an alternative you could use a bare lamp like a ghost light to make deep black shadows and little to make the foreground stand out from the background

> On 21 Apr 2017, at 15:05, Stephen Litterst via Stagecraft <stagecraft at theatrical.net> wrote:
> 
> On 4/20/17 6:21 PM, Don Taco via Stagecraft wrote:
> 
>> Tone the colors down so that the direction of the lights, and the 
>> shadows, can actually be noticed. Let go of the notion that nice 
>> definition and visibilty of the actor's faces is valuable, and work 
>> with a harsh key light and almost no fill. Use some floods on the set 
>> to create separation from the actors, instead of down or back lights.
> 
> We did a show once where the director wanted it to look like film noir. The LD ended up using the Rosco Calcolor series (4915, 4930, 4960, 4990) to keep the lighting monochromatic, but with variation in saturation. Then she did some of Taco's techniques to create shadows and separation.
> 
> Steve L.
> 
> -- 
> Stephen Litterst            Technical Operations Supervisor
> litterst at udel.edu           Mitchell Hall
> 302/831-0601                University of Delaware
> 
> 
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