Lighting for Televised Live Events

Making Your Live Production Look Great for the Eye and the Camera

James L. Moody, Jeff Ravitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000380392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

Lighting for Televised Live Events unlocks the science, art, philosophies, and language of creating lighting for live entertainment and presentations that work for the television camera as well as for the live audience.

The book explores how to retain the essence and excitement of a live production while assuring that the show looks its best on-camera for the millions of viewers that can only see it on their TV, computer, tablet, or mobile phone screen. Readers will learn how to adapt an existing stage show for the camera, as well as how to design live entertainment or events specifically for TV. Filled with real-life examples and illustrations, the book covers a wide range of topics, including:

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• how exposure and color work for the camera;

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• how angle, visual balance, and composition can make people and backgrounds look their best, while preserving theatricality;

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• information on camera equipment, screens, and projectors, as well as the control room environments that are found on a professional shoot;

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• the unique challenges of lighting for the IMAG video screens used at festivals and concerts.

Lighting for Televised Live Events is aimed at lighting design students, as well as professional designers that are considering a career — or a career expansion — in television. It is an essential resource for any stage lighting designer whose show may be shot for a television special or a live webcast and who will be asked by their client to collaborate with the incoming video team.

Part I
The Science

Chapter 1:
Introduction

Making Your Live Production Look Great for the Eye and the Camera

Jeff Ravitz and James L. Moody

1.1 From the 1954 book Television Works Like This by Jeanne and Robert Bendick (Whittlesey House).

Source: photo courtesy of Bob Barnhart.

The inevitable conflict between a recorded media’s lighting needs and the obligation to the live audience, who pay good money to see a concert, can be a real quandary. In most cases, the look of the live show, whether it be a concert, a theatrical production, or a corporate meeting, will very likely need to be broadened for video or film capture, or the recorded production will suffer.

“Televised Live Events”—as the title of the book declares—refers to the countless live shows that are being captured as TV specials or streaming webcasts. We also include, as part of this definition, live corporate presentations that are being displayed on IMAG screens, beamed via closed-circuit streaming to satellite locations, and archived for future reference. Lit with theatrical techniques, they often need careful tweaking and modification to look good for the camera. There is a science to the art of this adaptation process and, of course, the converse, too.

Developing the “eye” and the techniques—the “chops”—starts with an understanding of the fundamentals of lighting for the camera. This does not mean doing away with the essence—the feel, the look, and the artistic goals of the original stage production. We take the position that it is possible, with careful and loving adjustment, to retain the drama and even the roughest edges of a show while making it “camera-friendly” for the viewing audience of potentially millions of television and online viewers who buy records and other products that are associated with these productions, but who only see the show as it appears on their screen.

We will discuss methodologies and artistic philosophy for the following production formats, which we consider the best suited to this approach:

• • Concert webcasts, specials, and individual songs captured to be promotional videos
• • Television news footage of the first three songs of a concert
• • Stand-up comedy specials
• • Live theatre being adapted for broadcast
• • Live presentations featuring motivational or educational speakers
• • Debates, interviews, panel discussions
• • Awards shows
• • E-sports webcasts
• • Corporate meetings seen on image magnification (IMAG) screens, captured for permanent archives, or beamed/streamed to remote corporate locations
• • Worship services streamed, captured, and/or IMAG’d
• • Any show that displays close-ups of speakers or performers on a screen as image magnification
• • Any performance or presentation that is captured by a television camera for streaming, broadcast, IMAG, or archiving.

In addition to this list, it is reasonable to include other public media exposure over which the performers or presenters have little control, such as news photography and amateur phone photos and videos that are uploaded to social media sites to be shared with the entire world. These, as well as the professional televised and streamed genres listed above, contribute to the image of people who generally endeavor to look their best to their fans and the public at large. Lighting is now an important part of how our clients appear to the world outside the venue.

Your job as lighting designer, whether for stage or broadcast, is to enhance the artist’s image. If the recorded or live material is inadequate for the camera because you would not adjust your show’s lighting, the artist is the loser. Things have changed because the newest and best video cameras have a usable dynamic range—the span between the brightest and darkest objects in the frame that the camera can reproduce with a quality image (see Chapter 4)—that is so much greater than ever before. The latest camera sensors allow for a good picture in extremely low light while simultaneously handling very bright intensities in the same shot. Therefore, the old and much feared solution of earlier days that threatened the addition of massive arrays of white front light, is no longer necessary. Nor is that the style of today’s television aesthetic. So, take heart. There is a way to make your show look good for both the live audience and the camera. However, just because the cameras have gotten better, there is so much more involved to create quality lighting for television.

But even if your production will not be shot for a television special or streaming webcast, bear in mind that IMAG screens and television cameras are now ubiquitous in the concert and corporate worlds. A show that plays arenas, stadiums, or ballrooms will almost certainly include an IMAG (see Chapter 13) system to show close-ups of the performers or presenters.

Adhering to the basic ground rules of good lighting for the camera is more essential than ever in the extremely competitive world of touring lighting directors and designers. Artists and their managers are evaluating touring LDs as much for their understanding of television lighting techniques as for their live show lighting skills. Not only is there a mandate to make the IMAG image look good, but also, when the time comes to create a TV special or video of the live show, management will expect that the LD will be ready, willing, and able to collaborate and communicate with the television team that is invited to help produce the special.

The majority of touring shows, as well as every music-based television series, make heavy use of LED digital screens as a major component of their backgrounds. These displays, comprised of thousands of red, blue, and green light-emitting diodes, come in a range of resolutions and brightness capabilities. But even the dimmest screens can easily overwhelm the stage picture. While the naked eye will naturally adjust for the radical difference in intensities between the screens and the talent, the television camera will make the disparity of the brightness levels between the stage versus the screens quite obvious.

Even with no video screens onstage to contend with, a live show’s lighting can be quite unbalanced for the camera. Sometimes the difference in brightness levels of one performer to another, or between a cyclorama and the rest of the stage, can be enough to tilt your camera’s picture off its equilibrium.

How can we best handle the stage show so video elements on bright LED screens complement the live experience of the audience? What techniques can we employ to assure that our stage lighting levels are in a range that works for the spectators as well as for the camera? As mentioned, with today’s camera technology (see Chapter 12) there is little need—or time—for a show to be totally re-lit. Rather, balance is the key (see Chapter 5), even with the much greater latitude of modern camera sensors. We will delve into the subject of how to make varying levels of lighting intensity create foreground-to-background depth, layering, and variety without under- or overexposing. Sometimes it takes only a tweak of intensity to make all the difference, but you must know where to begin the process.

Angle can be used to create drama (see Chapter 7), or it can flatter or enhance a face or a scenic object. Your stage show might look creative and beautiful to the human eye, especially when seen from a distance, and that’s what you were hired to do as the live show designer. But that same look, when seen magnified many times on a television screen, might not be as complimentary. Flaws on skin and scenery may be more visible on-camera than to the live audience. The art and science of the angles used in lighting may differ in some regards between the world of live entertainment and that which is captured on video or film. But they do not have to be mutually exclusive. We will address this idea and discuss how angle can be used to enhance your stage show, your performers, and your cameras.

The stage lighting designer must perform, in a sense, the combined functions of a television director and cinematographer since it is the lighting that tells the audience where to look, just as an edited series of images would do for the viewer at home. It is the LD that creates the stage picture and visual focus. However, when that same show is being captured on video or film, the television or film director makes those decisions. This creates a situation that requires the LD to carefully examine the lighting approach. For a multi-camera shoot—which comprises the majority of TV production styles this book will discuss—each of several cameras will be seeing, simultaneously, a different part of the stage at any given moment. This implies that more onstage elements and performers must be given a proper degree of lighting treatment so that any angle or camera shot can be used as the director desires. We will elaborate on this concept of overall composition of the stage look.

Color (see Chapter 6) is another powerful property of light, and if you want to portray your artists on-camera with the most flattering skin tone you will need to learn how to manipulate the color that is generated by the numerous lamp sources available to today’s lighting practitioners. It is important to understand that the camera sees color in a much more objective way than the human eye does.

You can also use the power of color to create dramatic statements. Today’s cameras can handle saturated color better than ever, but there is still a limit to how much they can be adjusted before the color becomes distorted or unrecognizable as the color you began with. At this point in the process, the solution might involve collaboration between you and the video engineering department. Knowing who the video team is and how they can help is an essential part of the process.

The topic of color fidelity is an ever-expanding subject in the lighting community, and extremely so in the television and film world. As mentioned above, the goal is to reproduce colors faithfully so the viewer sees colors as they are in real life. Chapter 6 has an explanation of the measurement indexes, both old and new, that are being used to rate the accuracy of color reproduction.

A logical extension of the color discussion is the understanding and mastery of color temperature when lighting for the camera, especially when a live show is being adapted for video capture. The color you choose for your primary face lighting (key light) of the performers has an overall effect on the entire image that is created. In a world where so many shows have video content and IMAG where screens appear in the same camera shot as the performers, it becomes essential to coordinate the color of the stage lighting, particularly the key lighting, with the output color of the video or projection screens. The differential between the screen’s color and the lighting color on performers’ faces can be enough to result in a very mismatched picture. We will explore this and other topics related to color temperature.

When adapting the lighting of an existing or touring stage show in preparation for capture on video or film, the television lighting consultant will have a multitude of technical logistics to consider. A large dose of diplomacy is required, too, when the television team has to disrupt the stage show’s daily setup routine. The show’s personnel may be concerned the TV folks will undo all their hard work. The consultant, as well as the entire video staff, will need to approach the job with sensitivity to the show crew’s reluctance to “welcome” the TV production into their territory. As the show LD, it is equally important to go into the project with an open mind and willingness to cooperate, so an exciting show can be recorded and performed to everyone’s satisfaction. We will share case studies by working television LDs that describe the ups and downs that can occur in these joint-effort projects.

The film look is highly regarded as the standard for on-screen storytelling. The cinematic picture has subtler and less saturated highlights, softer colors, a subliminally different frame rate and an almost indescribable deliciousness. Digital video, with its hyper-sharp detail and searing highlights, is perceived to be a slick and more “real life look”: the news, sports, or a talk show. No wonder many sitcoms used to shoot on film and then convert to video for digital editing. But the cameras are getting better, and so the LDs must be better. Even if you are shooting digitally, should you aim for a look that feels more cinematic? It’s a choice and must be part of the production conversatio...