Need Light Suggestions for Our Gym Stage

[JGrandt]

I saw the out Gym thread, but my needs are a little different, so i thought I would start a separate thread.

Our DCE for Children's Ministry and I are working on a new Family service that will start in our Multi-Purpose room, but we expect to out grow it pretty quickly, which will require us to move into the school's gym. This will give us a nice canvas to work with. The stage will be located in front of a huge white wall that we will be using for a massive projection screen (more on that later, maybe another post in the future). The image of the stage area is below.

There will be a 16'x8' stage created using 2' high mobile platforms. We wont have any fancy decorations, but I need some suggestions on how to light the stage from the front. All house lights will be off, and the only "light" in the room will be the two projectors. Below is a panorama image from the stage area. I was thinking of mounting a light near the corners of the beams near center court (where the vertical beam meats the ceiling). These lights would be roughly 38' from the top of the Pastors head and have an 11 degree angle of attack. And I want to and try to limit the wash the lighting might cause on the projection screen.

Additionally, I would like to have 2 or 3 LED cans closer to the stage for effect lighting. (I am leaning towards an Elation Opti Tri Par)

I have NO experience with lighting and would appreciate some suggestions. i dont have a TON of money to spend on this (maybe $3000 for all 4 of 5 lights). Ideally I want all LED, but I dont know how possible that will be given my budget.

Any suggestions?

[waynehoskins]

A couple of thoughts.

Ideally you want the vertical angle of frontlight to be about 45 degrees above the horizon from the target's head. The flatter it is, the more spill you will have upstage and the less defined a person's features will be; the steeper it is, the better isolation you will have, but at a point the target will develop raccoon eyes. Generally the 30-60 degree range is pretty safe. Unless your steel is at 45 feet above the floor, there's no way that 36 feet out from the lip of the stage is anywhere close to 45deg above their heads.

You will have a projection screen immediately upstage of your actors, so you want to carefully control any light that might hit it. If your frontlights are at the recommended 45 degrees above horizon, that means the light that hits the head of a 6'-0" person will hit the floor six feet behind him, so to not light up the screen you'd have to restrict the actors to the downstage two feet of the stage and carefully shutter it off right at the tops of their heads there. Obviously that's not a viable solution.

Let me suggest another approach. For excellent front-to-back isolation, you can use sidelight. There are two basic ways to do sides: "area sides" which are about 45deg up and provide good left-to-right area isolation as well, and "pipe-end sides" which are much flatter, as far offstage as they can go. For this, I think area sides are a winner. Use profile (Leko) fixtures and shutter the beams off right at the screen. Off the top of my head, look at 36deg fixtures, maybe 26s.

Side-only is great but leaves a little too much shadow on the faces. Obviously we can't hit them from an ideal front position without washing out the screen, but we can go extremely steep, like 60-70 degrees. Remember, this is just to fill in some of the shadows. Again, we use profile (Leko) fixtures so we can precisely shape the beam of light.

Adding steep fronts can start to add raccoon eyes, so perhaps we might want to revisit an ancient technique, footlights. Just dust these a little to fill in the eyes really.

Realistically, total fixture count is at least 9 Lekos (front and two sides for three areas: L, C, R) plus the footlights, which could be Lekos, strips, etc. Strips are just about the most common fixture for those. Doesn't include effect lighting, or even backlight (I didn't address it since I think normal techniques should work). LEDs are out because you need precise, hard-edge beam control, and LEDs are a narrow-beam wash fixture.

Edit: I just re-read your post and I may have assumed incorrectly how you're doing projections. Are you projecting immediately behind the platforms or over to the sides? If you're not projecting behind the platforms, that simplifies things, not only lighting, but how to project onto the wall without going through people. In that case, you could probably get away with some LEDs, but probably not for fronts since they don't have beam control and all but the most expensive don't white-mix very well.

Tell more about how you're planning to use the space. Most of what I said about how you'd have to light it will probably not be correct, but it's still valid if you do use the entire back wall as a projection screen.

[JGrandt]

Originally Posted by waynehoskins

A couple of thoughts.

Ideally you want the vertical angle of frontlight to be about 45 degrees above the horizon from the target's head...... Unless your steel is at 45 feet above the floor, there's no way that 36 feet out from the lip of the stage is anywhere close to 45deg above their heads.

Actually, it's roughly 26' to the beams, and the beams are 26' tall. So, it is about 45 degree angle. Measured it this morning

[waynehoskins]

Originally Posted by JGrandt

Actually, it's roughly 26' to the beams, and the beams are 26' tall. So, it is about 45 degree angle. Measured it this morning

But did you subtract 8 feet from the height? 45 degrees above head, not floor, so to a person on a 2-foot platform, the 26-foot-high steel is only 18 feet up, and your lights are 8 feet too far away.

[JGrandt]

Wayne, my apologies. i went and re-looked at the gym. I made a rather major mistake in my measurements. I thought our cinder blocks were 12"x24", they at 8"x16", which threw off my math by, well, a lot. I have readjusted my post above. The lights would be at a distance of 38' and 11 degrees down from horizontal.

My estimate is that i would be cutting off the back 2-3 feet of projection, which is fine because most of the important stuff will be near the top of the wall.

[JGrandt]

Originally Posted by waynehoskins

Edit: I just re-read your post and I may have assumed incorrectly how you're doing projections. Are you projecting immediately behind the platforms or over to the sides?

The entire wall will be one massive "environmental" projection with a rectangle masked out near the top to use for the various service elements (lyrics, message illustrations, bible verses).

Here is an image of my "proof of concept" mock setup I did a few weeks back (the basketball hoop would be raised and the light turned off):