Television lighting designer Ted Wells has been honing his craft since the early 1970s. He starting out in Topeka, KS where, while still a student, he got work at the local PBS station and the CBS affiliate. He didn’t even have dimmers at the PBS station, but came up with lighting cues using a breaker panel, which no one at the station had ever seen done before.
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The history of lighting dates back to a distant time when there wasn’t any artificial lighting at all. In fact, in the early days, some film studios were designed with a rotating open roof to allow the maximum amount of natural light to fill the stage. Film companies moved to Hollywood in droves, where natural light was plentiful. Inevitably, directors wanted to film in the evenings, and they had the audacity to want a little “visual mood” in their scenes. Thankfully, along came Thomas Edison, followed closely by Mr. Mole, Mr. Richardson, and the Kliegl Brothers. Suddenly, the “electric” lighting industry was born.
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Shania Twain’s new show, Still the One, began its two-year, 110-show residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on Dec. 1, 2012. During the 100-minute, 18-song show, the venue’s 34-by-109-foot-wide 11mm HD LED screen is used to display a variety of images — from kaleidoscopic abstractions to clips featuring Twain, a Wild West saloon, leopards and a campfire scene in a forest.
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Until recently, projection video and LCD video displays were easily perceived as two distinct silos, separated as much by scale as by technology. Sure, a 50-inch LED-backlit LCD panel looked equally impressive in either a sports bar or in someone’s living room, but it was an entire league away from a 20-foot diagonal HD projection. But then LCDs began getting bigger and better — LG’s 100-inch screen leapfrogged Sharp’s 84-inch and then 90-incher, after which Sharp fought back with a 108-inch Aquos — and Christies tile-based video walls can scale to sizes almost as wide as can be imagined, all while substantially outshining projection video and at a competitive cost.
Read More »We are fortunate that we live in a world filled with millions of different hues, shades and variations of color. Lighting engineers have provided us with the ability to adjust the wavelength of light coming from automated lighting fixtures so that we can create a multitude of colors on stage. Lighting programmers are always working with color, and the consoles we program on a daily basis continue to provide us with more and more abilities to adjust the color outputting from our lighting instruments. Early automated fixtures simply provided a fixed color wheel with twelve or so colors to choose from. Today, most fixtures include very sophisticated color mixing system as well as fixed and special effect color adjustments. It is up to the programmer to understand the color mixing processes that fixtures and consoles employ so that they can create the looks desired by the designer or production.
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Sydney-based Mandylights lighting designers Richard Neville and Alex Grierson were part of the international creative team that designed Dubai’s 2013 New Year’s Eve celebrations. And it was a tall order — instead of focusing on, say, the 141-foot descent of an elaborate ball in Times Square, the 25-minute show took place in front of, and included, the Burj Khalifa skyscraper — officially the world’s tallest building at 2,722 feet high. The pair illuminated the Burj, lake and surrounding area with 15 individual performer stages and a 689-foot-long (210 meter) seamless projection screen.
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