I have been drafting the lights for Windows for a good part of today and yesterday. I don’t think I have written much if anything about drafting here, but it is certainly no less important to the design process than anything else.
Since many of my readers are not lighting designers, I will take a moment to define relevant terms.
Drafting: consists of the technical drawings that lighting and scenic designers draw up to communicate the physical aspects of the design to the technicians. A lightplot gives very precise information to the electricians about what kind of lights go where, how they should be controlled by the lighting control system, how they are plugged in, what color they receive or any accessories, like color changers, patterns or iris.
Worksheets: The working drawings executed by a lighting designer to determine the precise angles of the lighting instruments. These show where the individual lights go and become organized as part of a whole lighting system. They are then translated into the lightplot.
I know a lot of designers who do not enjoy drafting or doing worksheets. They find it the tedious work that one does before the fun design work. As a result they often do not take enough time in this part of the process and often run into major problems once in the theatre. It is possible to have every move one makes in a theatre be determined prior to entering the building. This is important because time is of the essence. It is possible to work out on paper everything necessary to do the lighting designers work. The only surprises should come from errors, like scenery not built to the proper specifications.
I love doing worksheets. It is a wonderful negotiation with the scenery. It is a fun process of discovery in terms of how the light moves in this particular scenic world. Every good set contains within it the lighting. Much of the work of a lighting designer is to find the lighting inherent to the set that most effectively aids the storytelling of the play.
The set for Windows is fairly straight forward. Two scenic walls that bring some interesting angles into a generic rectilinear stage space. Upstage are a series of lightboxes. We are planning on using color as a major storytelling device and these lightboxes will be a key element to that aspect of the visual storytelling.
One of the major challenges to this design comes neither from the scenery nor from the complexity of the text. At least not at first. The lighting grid, as is the case all over New York, is very low, less than 12 feet from the stage floor. The irony of small, specifically short, spaces is that they require a lot more lighting instruments to illuminate the space than do larger spaces. One could conceivably light a warehouse or a spanish fortress with fewer lights than one needs for a small New York stage.
On top of this, the play has many locations and it flows in and out of memory, so even the same location might not be the same place. This necessitates a wide breadth in terms of the lighting palette. As a result, one must be rather precise with the drafting of the lights. And as precise as one is, there are sacrifices to be made. One must guess what the staging will be like and all one can do is hope the guess is correct.
Spending time on the drafting outside the theatre means more time can be spent in the theatre doing the composition. The fun work. Drafting the lights is like a painter laying out their palette. One chooses not only colors, but also if one will use oils or acrylics for the subject at hand. Is one using traditional brushes or perhaps a palette knife? Changes might happen mid process, but the lighting designer, like the painter, wants the majority of these decisions to be made prior to beginning the composition.
Tags: craft, design, drafting, negotiation, terminology, time, windows, work
yup .
that is why, as an actor, i feel , that , spending time drafting myself, is actually an important part of the work.
Well, if you don’t draft yourself, who else is going to draft you?
heh. good question that !