Entry 66

Snapshots of Darren Aronofsky's  The Fountain

 image taken from: http://mithrasblog.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/the-fountain/

Darren Aronofsky is an truly visual storyteller and director. Each of his films has a stunning and well developed look and feel. The film of his that I found the most aesthetically pleasing was The Fountain. A story of life. love, loss, and rebirth, The Fountain is nothing if not beautiful and each moment in the movie is filled with this golden unearthly light. In some scenes, such as the astronauts journey through the stars, this light is purely abstract and symbolic. The scene is meant to be dreamlike and almost surreal so the light while beautiful isn't something we would ever really get a chance to experience. However, this golden glow appears in more realistic scenes as well such as in the second picture where a scientist and his wife visit a museum. The light scheme reflects the principles of magical realism, an artistic movement bent on revealing the magical beauty in the mundane and ordinary. The lights in this scene have the same golden unearthly vibe as the lights in the top picture, but they're grounded far more in reality. These simple museum lights have been enhanced to really stress just how heavenly the love between these two people is and just how special the bond they share has become.

Entry 65

Snapshot of Disney's  The Lion King, Broadway Musical

 image taken from: http://q8travelbud.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/lets-talk-about-art-the-lion-king/

When I was young a group of friends and I went to see this musical in Boston. I remember being blown  away by the costumes but looking back at the production there is a great deal of beautiful lighting in the musical as well. I brought up this picture because I was struck at how the lighting designer chose to handle the task of lighting the actors with these elaborate masks. In order to make such the audience focuses on the animal masks and sees those as the heads of the characters and not the actors' faces, the designers chose to aim these bright spotlights onto the masks and leave the rest of the actors' faces and bodies to be revealed by the fill-lights. It was a simple thing but it makes a huge impact.

Entry 64

Jillian Mayer's Scenic Jogging

Go Here for Video:

http://davidcastillogallery.com/jillian-mayer-scenic-jogging/

Scenic Jogging by Jillian Mayer is a video which features a lone woman running down the empty sidewalk of an urban street at night with a projection of a green field shown on the buildings behind her. Its quite an interesting sight to see this woman run down the streetlight lit road and see the difference in lighting when the projection has a wall or hard surface to hit and when an empty lot or street intersection denies the projection a surface. I wonder if you could have a play where an image was being projected but there was no surface for the projection to appear on and then during the climax a wall appeared and the projection became visible.

Entry 63

I was walking down a street with several buildings and noticed that the lights from each building, and the lights from the cars and lamps, and the light from the sunset all seemed to exist in a certain area of space. In a similar sense that I could break down each object into a certain shape or color there was a certain type of light unique to each object. I think in my mind I expected these lights to mix or be overpowered by one major light source. While there was no definite edge to the objects light they still had a certain degree of separation from them. I bet in the same way some artist use only color or shapes to create an environment an artist could use different types of light.

Entry 62

Glenn Ligon's  Hands

 image taken from: http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/GlennLigon/Images

This next picture is to examine the use of positive and negative space in light. Human's will always perceive darker colors as being behind or farther away from lighter colors.This picture Hands is a perfect example of this the only indications of depth present are the use of light in shadow, and of overlapping. The sizes of the hands don't vary that much so size isn't really an indicator. Light is used to reveal depth here by creating a background of darkness and a foreground of white lit hands. Oddly enough the degree of light an object receives is not related to how close of far away from us. the closest hands have varying degrees of light and the small faraway hands are both brightly lit and covered in shadow. Still the presence of the light allows use to see the details of the hands and to help with our perception of depth this means that closer objects have more details and objects that are further away have less.

Entry 61

Lorna Simpson's Necklines

 image taken from: http://lsimpsonstudio.com/photographicworks07.html

Lorna Simpson's Necklines is a great example of how to use contrast to reveal the subtle contours and curves of the human body. The light raps around the figure revealing peaks and casting even the smallest crevice into shadow. You can clearly see the slope of the neck and the dimples created by the collar bone. I especially love the middle image which beautifully exposes lips of the figure using the light to pull them away from the chin. The extra touch of the white shirt to contrast the dark background is also quite inspiring.

Entry 60

 TM Sisters' In a Matter of Speaking

Go Here for Video:

http://davidcastillogallery.com/tm-sisters-in-a-manner-of-speaking/

I wanted to try and find a video to talk about movement. Since, most of the images I look to for influence are well images I thought it would be a nice change of pace to look at a video. TM Sisters' In a Matter of Speaking is a seizure inducing splash of various images. The whole thing is super vibrant and the whole thing looks like a role of film burning up in a projector at certain points. However, there are small moments where the light is desaturated and a few scenes even contain darker looks like a sunset. While this clip may seem like a haphazard collection of blinking images there is a good deal a lighting director can learn from it. Mainly that the audience needs moments to rest. The bright flashes maintain there jarring effect by including inbetween low intense moments. Also, it doesn't matter how crazy a light's movement is if a bright spotlight is being shined in your face that is the first thing you will notice even if that bright light isn't moving a great deal.

Entry 59

 Xaviera Simmons' American Book Covers 

 image taken from: http://davidcastillogallery.com/xaviera-simmons-american-book-covers/

I wanted to talk about this picture and the works of Xaviera Simmons in general because after looking at picture after picture of emotionally manipulated lighting compositions I found it rather striking to find a picture with such "natural" light. Now, I used quotes because I don't mean that this is the only piece I've seen in such a long time that used light from the actual environment. I mean that this piece simply uses light to make the character visible and tell the time of day. The light here doesn't tell us anything about the narrative the artist is trying to convey. You can tell the scene is taking place sometime during the spring or summer during a clear sunny day but that is all. The person in this piece could be feeling any number of emotions and the story could be a comedy or tragedy the light alone doesn't tell us that. But, even this in-fact does tell us something about the photo. The artist chose to stage this shot during this time of day, she chose to shoot in this location during this season. Did she want the audience to only focus on the actions of the figure not the mood of the scene that surrounded her? Was she striving for a truly realistic shot to fool us into thinking this was a real scene not a staged photograph? Did she mean for the light to have a feel, to be welcoming and bright, and for that feeling to be in contrast with the figure inside that environment? When can a lack of a discernible mood be used by a designer to enforce a mood or style?

Entry 58

Recently I was able to aid in the lighting set up for the play Ensemble. It was an enjoyable experience working with the lighting fixtures and trying new hanging arrangements. But, while I was busy hanging those lights I noticed there were a lot of things I noticed about how the lights interacted with each other that I just couldn't really explain. Like how a light will look one color when it is by itself but when another light is present that color seems to change. The relationship between intensity and color is something I've written about almost every other post but really what is the deal. I wish I knew a little more about the science of light and how it works; like why the shape and angle of objects change when passing through a transparent surface like water or glass. Or just how far you could go in either infrared or ultra-violet light. Like how if you get something cold enough it feels like a burn, can you have a light so ultra-violet it behaves like an infrared. Mostly, the whole experience of hanging lights, observing light, and pondering about lights made me wonder if I have run out of things to say. Just how much can a person write about their uninformed observations of lights before they have to start doing calculations and experiments to learn more.

Entry 57

Rashid Johnson's Cosmic Topology

 image taken from: http://www.davidkordanskygallery.com/?aid=20&n=artists

Rashid Johnson's work perfectly illustrates how the object being lit is just as important a factor to consider in lighting as the lights used in the scene. Certain areas of this piece, Cosmic Topology, really stand out due to their brightness, but the light on the piece is fairly uniform. The golden spray paint reflects the light in such a way that we see more light coming from those areas than any other. This is obviously due to the simple nature of reflections and such but I bring it up because it again shows what you can do when you use the item being lighted in your lighting design. The light shown on this object is white; yet, thanks to the reflective color of the metal we see yellow light. With a single white light and five highly reflective yellow spots the whole lighting look is changed from white to yellow.

Entry 56

I've noticed that when a room has one light on and other light off I can see the differences in the amount of light present in the two areas when I look at a wall. The wall not illuminated by the first light is dark and there is a distinct edge/area where the rays of the light reach. However, without the wall I can't tell where the light ends it just gradually gets darker, there is no place on the floor like there is on the wall.

Entry 55

The Drawer Boy Reference Images:

Here are some images I would reference if I was tasked with creating the lighting design for The Drawer Boy, a play by Michael Healey.

Outside: Early Morning/Dawn 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outside: Mid-Day/Afternoon

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outside: Evening/Midnight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inside: Mid-Day/Afternoon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inside: Evening/Dinner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mood: Angus' Delusions/Sad Memories 

Entry 54

(L-to-R) Barkley L. Hendricks' Tuff Tony, Icon for Fifi, and Tequila

 images taken from: http://nasher.duke.edu/galleries/main_gallery/?cat=1&offset=0&pic_id=1

This comparison is really more of an illustration of a point. When lighting figures who are wearing similar colors to the colors of the sources a designer always has to be aware of possible washing out. If the objects and the lights colors are too similar the figures can fade into the background and the whole scene can appear flat. Barkley L. Hendricks; however, seems to prefer scenes where the colors of his figures reflect the colors of the background and has some great solutions to any fading affects. First, off he uses contrasts in saturation and vibrancy, all of the backgrounds in these three pieces are much softer and much more tinted then the figures. Tequila features a light pink background and though the mixture of red and white on the woman's clothes reads overall as pinkish to the viewer, the woman's form is still fully realized thanks to the sheer vibrancy of the red and white. The same is true of Icon for Fifi which features a woman in a highly reflective satin yellow jumper against a more brownish and muted backdrop. For Tuff Tony it appears as if Barkley L. Hendricks added some light blues to the white of his background in order to make the man's white clothes seem that much more pure in comparison.