How to Get Started with Stage Lighting

Good stage lighting isn't about owning the most fixtures. It's about putting the right light in the right place for a clear reason. This guide walks through how lighting designers think about a stage, where to start if you're building or upgrading a rig, and what to gather before you ask for a package.

What lighting needs to do

Before talking about fixtures and consoles, agree on the job. Lighting designers usually describe four of them:

• Visibility. The audience has to see faces and expressions. If they can't see the actors, nothing else matters.
• Focus. Light tells the audience where to look. The brightest thing on stage pulls the eye.
• Mood. Color, angle and intensity shape how a moment feels: warm and safe, cold and lonely, tense, joyful.
• Time and place. Morning or midnight, indoors or out, summer or winter. Light sets the scene before anyone speaks.

Every choice in this guide serves one of those four. When a purchase doesn't help the audience see, look, feel or understand where they are, it can usually wait.

Start with front light

If you only do one thing well, light faces. Front light comes from the audience side of the stage, from front-of-house (FOH) positions such as a catwalk, a balcony rail or a truss over the house. It is the single most important system on any stage, and the right place to spend first.

Divide the stage into acting areas

Instead of trying to cover the whole stage with a few big lights, divide it into a grid of acting areas, each commonly planned at roughly 8 to 10 feet across. A small stage usually works out to six to nine areas. Each area gets its own front light, so you can bring up only the part of the stage where a scene is happening, and the areas overlap so actors stay lit as they cross.

Two lights per area, at about 45°

The most widely taught approach (often called the McCandless method) lights each area with two fixtures: one from each side, each about 45° to the side of the actor and about 45° above them. Light from one side only leaves half the face in shadow. Light from straight on flattens the face and throws a shadow directly behind the actor. Two lights from 45° keep both eyes lit and give the face shape. Many designers also give the two sides slightly different color, one a little warmer and one a little cooler, for extra dimension.

So a stage with six to nine areas typically needs 12 to 18 front light fixtures. That number surprises people, but it is what makes even, controllable light possible.

Keep light off the proscenium and scenery

Front light usually comes from ellipsoidal (also called profile) fixtures. They have shutters, metal blades that cut a hard edge on the beam, so you can keep light off the proscenium arch, the masking and the top of the set. Lens angle matters too: the farther the fixture is from the stage, the narrower the lens needs to be to make the same size pool.

Add top, back and side light for depth

Front light makes actors visible. Light from other directions makes them look three-dimensional and separates them from the scenery. These fixtures hang over the stage on electrics (the lighting pipes) or on booms in the wings.

• Top light comes straight down. It creates pools of light, sets mood, and is often where a stage-wide color wash lives.
• Back light comes from behind and above the actor, aimed toward the audience at shoulder height. It outlines heads and shoulders and lifts actors off the background. It is one of the most noticeable upgrades a stage can make.
• Side light comes from booms (vertical pipes) in the wings. It sculpts the body and lights movement, which is why dance relies on it. Low side light, sometimes called shins, lights legs and leaps.

Many stages cover the whole playing area with LED wash fixtures on the overhead electrics, typically six to twelve fixtures per wash system, matched to the stage width and the height of the pipes. Because color-mixing LEDs can produce many colors from one fixture, a single wash system can play many moods.

Light the cyc or backdrop

A cyclorama, or cyc, is a large fabric drop at the back of the stage. Lit evenly in color, it becomes a sky, a sunset, a night scene or an abstract field of color, and it's one of the most efficient ways to change the whole look of a show.

• From the top: cyc fixtures on an upstage electric, aimed down the fabric. Fixtures designed for cycs spread light unevenly on purpose, so it blends from top to bottom without a hot spot. A common rule of thumb is one top unit for every 6 to 10 feet of cyc width.
• From the bottom: a ground row on the floor, often hidden behind a low masking piece, aimed up. Ground rows need more units for an even result.
• Both together give the smoothest blend and let you build gradients, like a deep blue sky fading to a warm horizon.

Keep acting areas far enough downstage that front light and actors' shadows don't land on the cyc.

Control: console, DMX and addressing

The lighting console stores looks, called cues, and plays them back in order when the operator presses GO. Choose a console that can handle the number of fixtures you plan to own in a few years, not only today, with a cue workflow your students can learn.

DMX in plain language

Most modern lighting control uses a standard called DMX. One DMX line, called a universe, carries 512 control channels. Each fixture listens to a small block of those channels, starting at its address.

• Channels: a simple dimmer uses one channel. A color-mixing LED uses several: one for each color, plus intensity and other features. Many fixtures offer more than one channel mode.
• Addressing: you set each fixture's starting address so its block doesn't overlap the next fixture's.
• Cabling: DMX runs from the console to the first fixture, then fixture to fixture in a daisy chain. The last fixture in the chain gets a terminator.
• Patching: in the console, you tell it which fixture lives at which address, so you can work with "Area 3 front light" instead of channel numbers.

Dimmers and power

Older incandescent fixtures are dimmed by a dimmer rack, which turns the power itself up and down. LED fixtures dim themselves internally, so they need constant (non-dimmed) power plus a DMX signal. Plugging an LED fixture into a dimmed circuit can cause flicker or damage it. Many dimmer systems can set individual circuits to a non-dim mode; your installer can confirm what yours can do.

LED vs older incandescent rigs

Many school stages have a mix of both. Here's how they differ, conceptually:

• Heat and power. LED fixtures run much cooler and draw far less power than incandescent fixtures of similar output. That means a cooler stage, and often room to add fixtures without adding circuits.
• Color. Incandescent fixtures change color with gel, a colored filter you cut and install by hand. Color-mixing LEDs change color from the console, cue by cue.
• Dimming and infrastructure. Incandescent needs dimmers. LED needs constant power and DMX to each fixture. Converting a stage is as much about power and data as about fixtures.
• Maintenance. LEDs don't need lamp replacements. Incandescent lamps are inexpensive individually but burn out and run hot.
• Light quality. Incandescent light warms toward amber as it dims, which many people love. LEDs vary widely: look for good color rendering on skin tones, smooth dimming at low levels, and quiet operation, since some LED fixtures use fans.

You don't have to replace everything at once. A common path is to add LED where color mixing pays off most (washes and the cyc), keep working incandescent front light in service, and convert front light later.

Build it in phases

A lighting system works best when each phase is useful on its own and the next phase builds on it. We plan packages this way:

The most important Phase 1 decision is infrastructure: a console, DMX runs and power that can support everything planned for Phases 2 and 3, so nothing has to be torn out later.

What to measure before you ask for a package

A few measurements and photos let us design a package that fits on the first pass:

• Stage width and depth, including the proscenium opening.
• Trim height: how high the overhead pipes or grid can fly or sit above the stage floor.
• Front-of-house positions (catwalk, balcony rail, box booms) and their distance to the edge of the stage. This sets the lens angles.
• Existing circuits, dimmers and power: how many circuits, where they are, and whether they're dimmed or constant.
• Existing fixtures and console: what you have, how many, and what still works.
• What you produce: plays, musicals, dance, concerts, assemblies, and how often.
• Budget and timing: your budget range, purchasing cycle, and when the system needs to be working.

Photos help: one from the back of the house looking at the stage, one from the stage looking out, one of each pipe or position, and one of your dimmer rack and console.

Safety

Want us to plan it?

Stage Gear designs lighting packages around your stage. Send us your measurements, photos and the kinds of shows you produce, and we'll recommend a complete, phased package that fits your space, budget and timeline.