Spotlights

Ok, so this probably won't interest most of you, but today, I'm going to talk about spotlights. I'm going to keep this short because I have lots of other homework to do.

To give this some context, my schools musical, Into the Woods opened last Friday. There were three shows last weekend, three this weekend, and we're doing the first act of the show this Wednesday for some elementary school kids. I'm on stage crew and do spotlights.

I'd like to propose that spotlights may be one of the least appreciated part of any show. No one notices that they exist unless they mess up. That said, they're one of the more labor intensive parts of the run crew (at least during the show itself). At our school, the run crew consists of sound (who controls the microphones and sound effects, lights (who control stage lights), props (who keep track of props), and fly (who control the various types of curtains. It's more complicated than that, but I'm not going to get into that right now). There is also a person on stage left and a person on stage right who generally keep track of things during the show.

For the musicals at our school, we normally have four spotlights, two larger, brighter ones on the far left and right, and two smaller, dimmer ones closer to the middle. We do spotlights from the catwalk, which is, for lack of a better explanation, a walkway with a railing that comes out of the ceiling above the first few rows of seats in the auditorium. Its roughly two-ish stories up from the floor. To get there, there is a long ladder on stage left and a short ladder and staircase on stage left. Throughout the show, the people running the spotlights stand next to their spots, generally on a stool of some kind to give them extra height. It is the only position on run crew that requires you to be standing at all times.

With the configuration of the spotlights at our school, the most important characters in the show are spotted by the bright spotlights, while the more minor characters are spotted by the soft spots. People usually spotted by the spotlight diagonal to them, so if a character enters on stage right, they will be spotted by the spotlight on stage left. There are two levers on the spotlights, one which opens the light on the stage and one which controls the size of the light. If the light is too small, you can't see the actors face, but if it is too large, it looks sloppy. There are handles to move the spotlight up and down and back and forth to follow the movement of the actors on the stage.

Spotting people is more difficult than it sounds. Because you are so high up and far away from the actors, it's hard to tell where the light from your spotlight will be when you turn it on. It takes lots of practice to be able to aim the spots correctly. Each person has their own way of aiming. I find it easiest to find a point on the spotlight and line it up with the actors so that the light hits them correctly.

Usually, during musicals at our school, the spotlights are only used during songs. This year, our director decided that the lighting was too dim and so spotlights were needed on all characters at all times. This is nigh impossible, as there are times when there are much more than four characters on stage at once and they all have lines. In addition, the director made this decision after the first show which didn't exactly give us much time to practice. To be clear, the only way to really practice spotlights is to practice while actors are running through the actual blocking of the show (our director didn't really seem to get that). We had to borrow scripts from the actors and go through each scene figuring out who would spot who. We had to change some scenes completely from the way that we'd been practicing.

The thing is, you wouldn't know this from watching the show. Unless one of us completely misses the person whom they are attempting to spot, and their light winds up randomly in the middle of the stage, you don't think about spots at all. It wouldn't cross your mind to think that there are four people standing above your heads wrestling with a light to get it in the right place at the right time so that you can see the actors face. So I guess my point is, the next time you go to a show, try take a moment to appreciate the work that was put into it by all the people behind the scenes, whose work is essential to the show, but whom you can't see. Please.