Lighting fit up for “the Living Unknown Soldier”

The Fit up for the ‘Unknown Living Soldier’ took place on Sunday 10th Feb in the Arcola’s main Studio space. On the surface it hardly differed from any other fit up, same kind of crew, as far as I know there were no specialists taking care of energy efficiency; the difference was that there were more energy efficient lanterns, including LED moving heads and batons (see Fig. 1) florescent tubes and some other filament lanterns such as low wattage source 4′s and par 16s. LED fixtures are starting to be used a little more in theatre but they are still quite rare, some have a tendency to project unfortunate colour separated shadows, this means that when a person is under the light they may have three different coloured shadows behind them. However the fixtures used on this project didn’t do that, the colours mixed quite well, partly due to the frosted covers we fixed them with. See Fig.2 : you can see from this image that it is possible to remove the lenses to reveal the tiny LEDs beneath, we replaced the lenses they came with, with frosted versions which made the light and colour mixing appear much smoother. Florescent tubes are used for main overhead lighting in buildings here they were used as a theatrical light source, less rare than LEDs in theatre but not as regularly used as typical theatrical fixtures, a potential problem with Florescent tubes is that they can spill to all sorts of undesirable places, to solve this problem we surrounded the fixtures in black foil to make the light more directional, they were also covered in a warm orangey gel to warm the colour of the light (see Fig. 3). Normal fluorescent fittings are a discharge type source and don’t have a filament like household lamps. They require a constant voltage which, if it get too low makes the fittings flicker. However, we had dimmable fittings made by Robert Juliat which have a special metallic strip along the tube which allows for the voltage to be lowered and the fixtures dimmed as a result. This, together with special dimmers and some clever physics means that fluorescents can be dimmed. Overall the energy used was probably very low when compared to other productions of this size, by using low energy LEDs and Florescent tubes in such strong positions there was less need for lanterns which require more energy, such as Source four profile spots; these are theatrical fixtures more often found in theatre than LEDs, They normally come with 575W or 750W lamps. Source fours use a ‘High performance lamp’ or HPL with a special glass reflector (Diachroic reflector). This results in source fours having a much brighter and whiter beam. It also makes the fixtures more efficient as a 575W lamp actually gives roughly the same light output as a standard 1000W tungsten lamp. We used even lower wattage 375W lamps, which were never run at full anyway to maintain energy efficiency but still have the colour temperature a tungsten source gives – which is often lacing in LED and fluorescent fixtures.

Jazz Wood – Crew
www.jazzwood.co.uk

Hadyn Williams -Crew

LED Lighting (Fig.1)

LED Lighting (Fig.2)

 Florescent tube (Fig.3)

Photo Credit: Jazz Wood.