Lights, Camera, Teddy Bear

“So, what did you do in college today?”

“Played with teddy bears.”

This… is… Technical Theatre.

Q: Have you ever noticed how, when you’re in a theatre, you can usually see the actors’ faces?
A: Lights. If your answer to the previous question was, “No, actually, that’s never been my experience,” then I could understand if you probably didn’t care much for theatre.

Have you ever learned more about a specific subject than you ever thought you would? Have you ever opened a high-powered light fixture, closed it, and hung it thirty feet above the floor? (Have you ever read so many sentences in the second person that you thought you were reading a self-help manual?) Well, this is what’s happenin’ in TA 120: Technical Theatre. Let me get back to what I was saying earlier about the teddy bear, because I feel that’s slightly more interesting to slightly more people than light fixtures. (I could always be wrong, and I can appreciate those more technically-minded).

Here’s the situation: four groups each get a bunch (that’s a technical term) of lights and a teddy bear. Take these items and light the bear as if it were an actor in a scene using a line from a script. Use at least two lighting cues. My group got a line similar to “There is another side to me. I see myself… making pancakes.” Here’s the creative process: First, place the bear on a stool facing a mirror so that he can see himself and what he is becoming. We imagined the first line as something rather sinister, with mood of a darker nature. The message we wanted to get across was that the bear was contemplating another dimension, in a sense, where he saw himself as something better than the present. A “greener on the other side” moment, if you will. To effect this feeling, we lit the bear from behind, so that his face would appear, in the mirror, in shadow. We also draped white Christmas lights over the top of the mirror. They hung down in such a way as to give the sense of a portal to the other bear’s world. The next cue was for the line,  “I see myself…” so we added two lights to illuminate the bear’s face, one on either side to provide some depth. For the final cue, the terribly upbeat “Making pancakes!” we added two more lights, from above, to more totally illuminate the scene, drawing out the bear’s happiness into the scene. Still, though happy at the moment, the portal remained open throughout, leaving the possibility for reversion. So, one could never be certain as to the bear’s happiness. Was he actually happy to be making pancakes? Or was he only enacting the apparently happy role that he saw in the mirror? Deep stuff, through and through.

Just this morning we got the low-down on two kinds of lighting fixtures one might typically find in a school theatre or auditorium (or cafegymatorium). The first we call a Fresnel light, after Anton Fresnel (eponymous inventor of a lens, cut in a certain way, which allows the amplification of light with a small piece of glass). It’s essentially a light bulb (or, in a technical theatre term, a lamp), a reflector behind it, and the Fresnel lens in the front, through which the light streams on its merry way. It’s also got shutters, which can be important features if you want any variation in your lighting at all. The second type of light we looked at is what’s called an ellipsoidal reflector spotlight. With this style of light, one can move the lens toward or away from the lamp inside, allowing the scene a sharper or softer look.

All in all, a fascinating subject. Up to this point in my technical theatrical career, I’ve concerned myself mostly with sound, having set up and run mics and soundboard for various productions in high school and college, so it’s interesting to learn how the other stuff works. 

For other news, I’ll lay out some bullet points:

- Midterm in Astronomy (ASTR 001) and

- Exam in Statistics (PSYCH 105) both happened earlier today, and about both of which I felt overly confident. Time will tell…

- Radio show next Wednesday at 9pm on ROCU, in which I and the company of the Theatre Hyperion read the first two chapters of the radio adaptation of Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

- Filmed the first episode of CCNews with the Clark Cable Network, our school’s fabulous television station, today. Found out that liquid water may once have flown on Mars. #science (CCN production meetings every Tuesday at 9:00pm in the basement of Sanford Hall -- all Clark students welcome.)

- Next Saturday, at 8pm in Atwood Hall, I can be found performing an illusion in Clark’s Got Talent, where I’m going to attempt to saw someone in half.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to build a box.