Continuing our series on templates we will stay outside for the time being and, after having looked at leaves and trees, we will move on to clouds and skies. Clouds can be some of the trickiest templates to work with. At the same time they can, with very simple and subtle gestures, provide immediate depth and nuance to a stage picture. A simple two tone cyc will, with the addition of a few soft clouds, gain a depth of naturalism that you can never achieve with color alone.
Clouds must be thought of in relation to the sky you are lighting. Time of day becomes critical to our template choice. A streaky cloud is more likely to read as dawn or dusk. A large puffy cloud will read like something we see in the middle of the day. Color is very important when designing with clouds. As we observe in the natural world, a cloud often takes on the quality of light and then amplifies it. During a sunset the sky might do a simple ombre from amber to congo blue while the clouds appear on fire catching the colors everywhere in myriad shades of purple and red and yellow. During the day the sky might be a clear blue and filled with little fluffy clouds shimmering a brilliant white. After a rainstorm the skies might be almost wholly obscured by a million shades of grey in the dark and heavy clouds.
Cloud templates come in several varieties and each have their benefits and drawbacks. Standard steel, like with leaves, provide a cookie cutter cut out of a shape that, with the proper attention to angle and sharpness can be either cartoonish or subtle. Even a template as silly as R78169 can, with the proper focus, turn into a very powerful effect when designing a sky.
Years ago I was calling focus for a designer on a production of Cloud 9. We were doing quite well working our way through the rig getting things pointed when I brought up the first of his template system and a pair of feet appeared on a wall. Curious, we brought up the next channel and there was another pair of feet. Noting a trend we turned on the whole system of 20 or 30 lights. All feet. A simple typo in the paperwork had caused the master electrician to order 30 pairs of feet rather than 30 clouds. Fortunately clouds are soft and mushy things. By taking the barrels all the way out past sharp the feet were transformed into clouds and the focus continued.
The softness of clouds is one of their most important attributes. Varying that softness is how we achieve real three dimensional effects. Layering two instances of of the same template, one on top of the other, with differing focus and varied intensity can create a photorealistic cloud effect. Layering is a critical component to designing a dynamic sky. A single cloud template will do little to convey the depth of a sky but when we layer in multiple templates in differing colors and focus, with varied intensity, we can create truly dynamic looks on our cyc or wall.
Cloud templates come in many shapes and sizes. Even when looking at the options for little fluffy clouds we have the clouds themselves, we have the underside of clouds, and we have their tops outlined. We can choose between tradition steel templates, or mesh patterns, or glass. We can use any or all of these template options to design dramatic skies.
Color plays a huge role when designing a sky. Perhaps a scene takes place in the morning as dawn shifts to day. You might cover a sky in various saturated streaks of salmon, amber, and yellow light which crossfade into softer, fluffier, pale lavender clouds over the course of the scene.
The movement of clouds is slow and subtle and beautiful. Capturing that on stage is a wonderful thing. One way to gain a sense of movement is to have many layers of clouds in various colors which shift and change intensity throughout a scene or production. However, using something like the Gam Film FX can be a wonderful way to, very simply and elegantly, give movement to an otherwise static sky. The Film FX, like any device that uses more than one pattern in the pattern slot, requires a very close attention during focus. Trouble can arise when getting the proper softness for one side of the film loop makes the other side appear too sharp edged. The extra time and care that it takes to focus these devices is well worth it for the end result.
The options for cloud templates are as varied as the sky is day to day. Building a sky is a wonderful combination of color and texture. The best way to understand how to design a sky is observation. Getting out and really looking up at the sky and watching the clouds move for minutes and hours on end will help to build an understanding of their subtle nuance and dramatic possibility.
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The first concern is the shape of the gobo. Sadly, this is something that is too often overlooked when considering a template for use in a production. When I say shape of template I do not mean the exact shape of the leaves themselves, but the overall shape of the pattern. As you can see from the example of R77732 the pattern has a round shape overall. No matter how you point the light, no matter how much softness, this template will always look round. While this might not be a concern in certain styles of production, or when you have a full stage wash on, it does become a concern for more naturalistic compositions. If you want to vary the intensity of the individual lights to pull focus to a certain area of the stage you will end up with little circles of leaves of varying intensity. Worse still, if you just want to turn on a single light, you end up with a circle of leaves which looks hokey at best.
When using a template like R77774 there is no concern that the template will look round. In fact it is impossible to focus the light in such a way that a single instance of the template appears round. The potential pitfall with these style templates is that you often need more physical instruments creating a tighter beam overlap in order to get a clean full stage look. The benefits of not having a round dot of leaves, however, far outweighs the need for greater precision in drafting, hang, and focus. There are plenty of examples of non-round templates but they are definitely the minority when it comes to leaf patterns.
Once the shape consideration has been resolved you need to consider density. Our example above of R77774 is great for more open sun filled compositions. The template lets a lot of light through while still maintaining the character of light through trees. But perhaps you want your templates to be more of an accent. Perhaps all that light, and the varied size of the spaces between steel, is not the right look. A template like R77733 gives a more uniform, dense, feel the the light. Similar in density to the R77732 noted above, this template shares with R77774 the characteristic of not being round. What density of template is wanted will be determined by the dramatic needs of the scene in question.
In addition to naturalistic effects, templates can be used to provide abstract patterns on floors or in atmospherically treated air. Used on floors, a standard paint job, or even colored floor, can be given a high dynamic range throughout a production thus allowing for many different visual landscapes upon which performers might traverse. In large musicals with minimal scenery, for example, the use of patterns and textures can be a powerful tool to lend a dynamic quality to an otherwise static space.
