The difference between the demand of TV lighting and the demand of live audience
In the past, performances in the theater could only be viewed in the theater, especially the artistic creation of lighting. Once the performance ended, it could only stay in the minds of the audience, and at most there would be a few pictures left.
Now, great changes have taken place in theater performances, mainly due to the impact of electronic media works and live broadcast. Electronic media works are shot and distributed in the form of digital or DVD, and live broadcasting can be seen everywhere. The live broadcasting in various places is mainly led by the national live broadcasting programs, and the United States is mainly led by the metropolitan theater.
The live shows are very interesting. The performances are recorded in real time by multiple stations, transmitted to national theaters in real time through satellite technology for releasing movies, and then relayed to theaters around the world according to the local time. At the beginning, people worried that this would reduce the demand for tickets for physical performances. At present, these worries are superfluous. Now people can watch the whole performance at one time instead of being limited to the whole performance cycle.
Interestingly, as a lighting engineer, he can be praised by friends who watch TV programs on the spot. This is the welfare of television. However, what is worrying is what the lighting effect will be like after the broadcast? What is the result of the picture entering the camera after photoelectric conversion, satellite transmission and video playback equipment?
For many stage lighting engineers, this is a challenge. They don’t understand and don’t have any experience. Therefore, the first thing to do well in TV lighting is to have people who understand these technologies, such as TV lighting designer or visual effects director. Especially when the stage lighting engineer is not at the scene due to other work, there will be a kind of uneasy feeling when handing over the work in this way, and the people in the program group will also have worries.
In terms of TV lighting, Mike Le Fevre is a veteran who has done many national live shows and made some performances of the Royal Opera House into films and TV. He is very clear that the first task for him to take over a play is to contact the TV lighting engineer to have a meeting (or dinner together) to discuss the requirements of the play for lighting, so as to formulate a lighting design scheme in line with the plot.
But the most important thing is to gain the trust of the crew leader, so that they feel that the work will go smoothly. Because some TV producers don’t like the lighting engineers in traditional theaters. They hope that they can shoot the performance well without spending any time and money to adjust the lighting. In fact, this is totally different. Once this happens, it usually will not lead to good results.
Michael faire and Bernie Davis are experienced in the field of television lighting. They said that the focus of the preliminary study is how to adjust the lighting, how to solve the huge difference between the TV lighting demand and the audience’s performance, and how much it costs.
Bernie Davis put forward three practical ideas on this issue: first, the camera is a low contrast device, which can process both under exposed and over exposed images, but it can’t process two kinds of images at the same time: in addition, the photographer won’t hear the audience leaving the Royal Opera House say, “the performance is wonderful, the actors are wonderful, but I think the light is too bright.”
In the end, the filmmaker will never hear an audience coming out of the theater saying, “I know it looks bad, but it’s better to watch it at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.”. What is emphasized here is whether the managers tell the audience of these TV theaters that they are looking at something different. Obviously, some have said it and some have not. Maybe they told the actors…
Key points of TV lighting design
In this case, how should lighting engineers cope with these changes?
Try to achieve the consistency between the shots, that is, it is similar to using a single machine to record the whole performance. Especially for the director and lighting engineer who want to record a single shot of a performance, they must make a recording script and shooting program.
In the interval of discussing the script with the director, the lighting engineer will get some dimming time. Ideally, the provided broadcast level cameras and high-quality, accurate setting and high-definition monitors (OLED in ideal case) can be used to adjust the lighting when walking on the stage.
When the lighting engineer has nothing to do, it is very important to have a programmer with traditional lighting on site. He not only knows how to program, but also can make changes quickly.
It is also necessary to have a standard design manual on site, which is conducive to the better combination of video recording and lighting programming, which is part of the performance planning. It is also particularly important that the on-site staff will use gray cards for accurate exposure test, wear specific performance costumes, and the skin color of the testers is similar to the actual actors.
In the TV production scene, it is mainly to control the light ratio to ensure the accurate exposure of the camera, so that the actor/actress is separated from the background, and the brightness is moderate. For example, in “Blue Deep Sea”, the background wall is made of semi-lens gauze, Mike and lighting designer hall make this transparency visible in the camera by increasing the illuminance of the sky light.
By adjusting all kinds of parameters, they let the camera capture the signal with high signal-to-noise ratio, get enough illumination to obtain the appropriate depth of field, and let the photographer fix the focus section in special cases. The tracking light needs to operate in low illumination (some nd filters can be added), and the setting is a little loose. It can be adjusted at any time in a long distance to prevent sudden decrease of brightness.
Color balance must be paid attention to when using multi light source mixed performance. Although the lighting engineer may think that light blue in S4 LEDs has been matched with VIPs, the camera will tell the difference quickly and directly. The dark color beyond the color gamut of the camera needs to be corrected. The pre recorded tapes and session samples are helpful to find out the existing problems, so that we can get enough time to solve these problems.
LED lamps work reliably, but it is easy to cause flicker in the camera, which is a common sense. The driver without such problems is the most ideal, but usually it is not specially specified, because it is expensive, and the live program is determined after the selection. In addition, the sky screen lighting is very uniform to the human eye, but it is not ideal to see through the camera. Any folds on the screen seen on the monitor will drive you crazy.
Through this mission, theater staff learned a lot of experience. First of all, most of the work is done by looking at the monitor rather than staring at the stage. Second, in addition to adjusting the lighting, there are many ways to improve the image quality. Some of these methods are very familiar to every photographer, such as aperture, others may seem strange, for example, adjust the gain, adjust the white balance, adjust the gamma curve and adjust the matrix. When the screen looks dull on the monitor, it is important to cooperate with the relevant technical personnel, who will tell the lighting engineer how to deal with it.
Thirdly, the camera reduces the task of the theater lighting engineer, no longer need to consider the viewing position of the audience, now it is completed by the camera. In addition, there are some new issues that need attention. For example, the directors of TV programs and movies will switch shots at any time, and the panoramic, mid shot and close-up shots of TV programs and movies are set and recorded separately. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the relationship between the seat and the light position.
The position of the front side of the stage is similar to that of the low front side light, which means that the lens is shot directly along a straight line under the light, and the actors will appear flat and have no three-dimensional feeling in this kind of lens. The audience can still remember that this was a prominent problem when shooting “deep blue”. Finally, this problem was solved by adjusting the seats and reducing the shooting range of the stage.