In our next zoom meeting, I suggested we change the strobe lighting in the ambulance scene to something that more fades in and out and perhaps moves if that were a possibility. I kept the red lighting that fell on the floor and a bit of the back wall while also having the two lights that are in the play always above the children’s beds turn into spiraling ‘sirens’ of sorts as if it actually were an ambulance. This was done fairly easily and then I’d finally got all my scenes designed. We went over the cue list again, timing them correctly and I changed some of the ways the lights transitioned – for example the ambulance scene faded in for a rather long time, with the lights moving before the red is fully visible to mirror the slow panic that forms inside a person when you witness someone you care about injure themselves. There is a short fade into the directors scene as it’s just simply a fade from the set lighting to normal lighting, but the toy scene the lights turned immediately red without any fade to match the exact moment the toys flew out the toybox. I made sure to have a reason behind each creative decision I took.

I have included a video of all my lighting designs and their transitions.

Cue list

I worked with Jonathan again on Capture with my designs, this time creating cues to make them come together. I’d created all the scenes now with lighting that fitted my designs and the ideas based on Caryl Churchill’s writing, postmodernism and naturalism. We’d also added a further design for how the stage is lit when the audience enters. I’d kept it predominantly basic as her plays aren’t over the top and needing extravagant lighting, but it is definitely designed in a way that will capture audience attention and make them view the play with questions rather than just being shown something.

One of the big things we’d been working on was the ambulance interruption scene and how that could be done. Although there were many ways, it would be nice to have something that really stood out as this is the final interruption and happens only a few lines before the play resets for the final time and then actually ends. We worked in Capture with a few ideas, but nothing quite stuck. For this reason, after the meeting Jonathan put together some potential ideas for me to have a look at and see if I liked. Although some of the back lighting ideas sparked an idea in me, they were all strobe lighting and as someone with epilepsy I occaisonally have trouble with strobe lighting and in one performance they used so much strobe lighting I was forced to leave the theatre. I chose to draw inspiration from them but completely eliminate the strobes. By using strobe lighting I feel like you cut off potential audience members, so it’s always safer to go without it in my opinion.

After the designs were sent to Jonathan we organised another zoom meeting. We worked on Capture again, Jonathan having created the stage based upon the designs I had sent. We added the lighting that I wanted on there and changed bits and pieces around, focusing on the lighting for each individual ‘scene’ to make sure it aligned with the designs. This was a lot easier to work with than Sims 4 because obviously you can create cues and see what you want as it would actually look on stage in Capture, whereas resources for lighting are extremely limited in a simulation game. It allowed for all sorts of different stage lighting and so there was a lot more choice. Having it in Capture was starting to make my vision a reality. I chose to have it be staged as though it were going to be performed in Jubilee Theatre as that is how I initially imagined staging it before lockdown began. It was good on Capture to be able to see the layout where the lights would be and how shadowing would work and how much of the stage would be lit up dependent on what light is used.

As Jonathan had requested, I made sketches of the stage and each change of lighting scene to try and get a visual idea of what I have with brief annotations of the main ideas. Although it was somewhat useful having a visual, my drawing abilities are very much limited, so I felt like these sketches weren’t an adequate representation of what I wanted – the description I’d given Jonathan was better than the drawings. Instead, I chose to create the stage and lighting on the Sims 4. Obviously this was still limited, but it gave a far better idea of what I wanted than my drawings had done. I made sure to screenshot these ideas and then put them into a word document which I annotated to help with the understanding and say when and where each lighting change occurs.

[embeddoc url=”https://eportfolios.roehampton.ac.uk/thomasp31/files/2020/05/Lighting-Sims-4-design.docx” download=”all” viewer=”google” ]

[embeddoc url=”https://eportfolios.roehampton.ac.uk/thomasp31/files/2020/05/Caryl-Churchill-Play-Plan.docx” download=”all” viewer=”google” ]

I decided on a play idea about parents dealing with their children’s nightmares and different ways the situation could play out. I briefly outlined some possible scenarios for interruptions in this and thought about the layout of the stage. I had a zoom call with Jonathan to work through possible lighting ideas for this and he introduced me to the software Capture. I told him my idea currently, and we thought about possible ideas to accommodate for each scene. I already knew quite a bit about lighting and how it would work in the theatre from my Technical Theatre module last term as I worked with him then too. I told him about what I was certain on and the ideas that were probably going to be included but potentially could be taken out. I decided on blue spotlights over the two beds immediately and initially wanted just natural coloured light from the centre of the stage light a light in a room, so we made a vague idea for this. I tried to describe the stage design in enough detail that he could work with something, and even though he said it would be good enough for him to create examples with he asked me to draw out my setting and send it to him for our next zoom meeting so that he could create definite examples for what I wanted.

I researched and compared lighting in naturalism and lighting in postmodernism and decided to combine the two to create a balance – it is naturalism lighting with a postmodernism element.

Naturalism strives to create an illusion of reality, whereas postmodernism is a reaction against modernism and chooses to attempt to make the audience ask questions instead of giving out answers. When putting this into lighting, there are many directions in which you could take, which is why I chose to balance them as I thought other lighting designers for Caryl Churchill’s work had also chosen to do. It creates a sense of reality but also has the audience questioning things, because although it’s set in a real place the dialogue of Heart’s Desire isn’t natural, with the unrealistic interruptions and the constant resets – the dialogue makes the audience ask questions that aren’t going to get any real answers, so I felt like my lighting should also reflect that. It looks realistic but at the same time it isn’t. Although where the lights are placed are predominantly what you would find in an actual room, the colours are not, and although I hadn’t totally decided on what I wanted, I knew I wanted blue light and probably a different colour light for the interruptions as they are the biggest mood changes in the entire piece.

I researched some Caryl Churchill plays that have already been put on to see if I could gain inspiration for my lighting design from there. I recalled what was used when we went as a class to go and see A Number performed at the Bridge Theatre as further aid. I knew it was fairly realistic, but it had black outs and lighting from general places. I therefore chose to have light coming from the centre of the bedroom as if it were a standard bedroom light. From looking at other plays, I noted how many of them chose to only spotlight what mattered and have the rest of the stage remain dark. There were also many places, including a performance of Blue Heart (which Heart’s Desire is included in) that used blue lighting as spotlights or undertones, which I thought was really nice. Not only does blue light illuminate the stage very nicely, but it also creates an atmosphere and mood that can easily mirror the emotions the characters display in the scene. I decided from here a bullet point list of what I was likely to make my lighting design like, but I wanted to do a bit more research before fully committing to a design and I also wanted to have more than just a rough idea of what I was going to write my play on.

I reread Blue Heart to decide which play I’d rather base my work off and decided on Heart’s Desire. I then read Heart’s Desire once more, this time going over it closely. I noted how there isn’t anything about the lighting, no set lighting design or anything to really work with from that perspective, so I instead decided to mark where the new ‘scenes’ started and ended as we did in a class near the beginning of term and mark where the atmosphere changed because those are the most likely places where lighting would be incorporated/changed. I made notes of how Heart’s Desire is written and what the main features are so I can write my play in line of what she did. I knew I needed a small amount of characters, it had to be set in only one room and that it had to have resets. I played around with ideas of family or friends living together before settling on the idea of parents and two children. This was more of a planning stage as I had no major ideas as to what I’d definitely write my play about and therefore there was limited directions in which I could approach my lighting design.

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