NEW

Our latest at TheLightingArchive.org:



Max Keller, the German Lighting Designer of Opera, has given us the records of his Tristan and Isolde, from the Metropolitan Opera in NY. (see Support Materials section for an explanation of the different Genres of Stage Lighting).



Les Miserables, Lighting by David Hersey, all 35 years of it, has many plots from many theatres around the world. One of the highlights is to watch the changing technology while accomplishing the same looks established in 1985. This material is in process on the site: more soon.



From ETC we are featuring their Headset audio of Ken Billington at the Tech Table recording his voice lighting the City Center’s Encore’s production of the musical Me and My Girl. Initially thought of as a training exercise for board operators, it is a wonderful glimpse of what we all do as Lighting Designers.



In Equipment under COLOR there are many new items:

video: Bill Brigham of the Brigham Gelatin Company explaining how they used to make their color media...gel colors

Spectrometer readings of 44 of the old colors found in the plots here from 1941 to 1958. We measured the color at dimmer readings of Full, 70%, 50%, 30% and 20%. We used an old resistance plate dimmer, actual DC current, and a real tungsten 500w Fresnel lamp.

There is an explanation of the above with photos and diagrams of the project.



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Modern theatrical lighting is a unique art form, whose history until now has been exceedingly difficult to study due to limited access to original lighting documents. The Lighting Archive website is developing a collection of actual plots, focus charts, cue sheets and other documents from real shows. We will place an emphasis on historical productions and designers who have made important contributions to our field.



These documents make evident the aesthetic development of the art form. The styles of the theatrical visual are affected not only by the personalities of the lighting designers but very importantly by the interplay between what equipment was being manufactured and how the designers were inspired to use it. Another major force affecting the aesthetics and the equipment is the extreme time and reliability pressures that operate in the economics of the theatre world. How has the development of the next big thing: computer consoles, color changers, scrollers, LEDs, moving lights, changed and enriched the visual possibilities? By a close examination of these documents, students and scholars can now witness the development of Lighting Design as it has made a greater and greater contribution to the theatrical experience.



To aid them we have created an Interactive segment of the website. Using Ken Billington's Sweeney Todd Broadway as the example follow the map pins in this segment to trace information about each unit as it appears in every document for this production. Lighting Design is sufficiently complicated: no one document contains all the information about a given lighting unit and how it is used in a given production. The pre-production paper work includes plot, section, hookup and shop order. The results of the work in the theatre are documented in the magic sheet, focus charts and cue sheets. See Eric Cornwell's Explanation of the Documents in the Support Materials section of this site.







