Saturday, December 30, 2006

HickoryDickory Wrap-Up: Lesson 2

This is the second post in my sequence of lighting lessons I learned during HickoryDickory. The first lesson was about maintaining the contrast between the actors and their surroundings.

The second lesson I learned was about sunlight. There is a convention in theatre lighting that moonlight is blue. You can use blue light, and people agree to believe that it's moonlight, even though it looks nothing like the moon. However, I discovered that there is no such convention about sunlight. Everyone always stereotypes the sun as being yellow, so I tried to create a sunny look by shining yellow light through a gobo to give the textured pattern of leaves. I discovered that it didn't really look like sunlight through leaves, it just looked weirdly greenish and acidic. When I removed the yellow gel entirely (on Charlie's recommendation), it looked a lot better.

What really makes sunlight look sunny is the angle; if you have a strong white illumination that is consistently coming from the same direction, it looks much more like sun.

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