TechStuff Steps Out of the Limelight

and screen. These shows are in response to a request to talk about Kleig lights, which I had just managed to mention towards the end of my previous episode with the introduction of the brothers Kleigel, who started a stage

theater lighting company in eight nine six. So for this episode, we're going to stick with stage lighting and we'll bring that up to the modern era before we switch gears to talk about lights that engineers developed specifically for the purposes of film and television, because they largely built old upon the lighting technology that was made for the stage. As a reminder, lighting was always important and that you want your audience to be able to see what's going on.

But for centuries, lighting was almost entirely about visibility and not artistic expression. That really began to change around the very end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Part of that shift was due to advances in technology. It was only through the transition to gas lights and then electricity where directors really had the capability to make more precise, fine tuned adjustments, to create new effects and moods, and to really make lighting part of

a scene. By the early twentieth century, many theaters around the world were embracing electric lights figuratively. If you did it literally, you would get burned and or electrocuted. Typically, these theaters were installing incandescent bulbs in the foot lights and in the border lights and the strip lights. These are lights that are all around the stage that project light onto the stage itself, and that was just for

the general stage lighting. Some would still use the older electric arc lights, the carbon arc lights for floodlights and spotlights, while other theaters would switch to extremely bright and very hot incandescent bulb lights, and these would be in the one thousand what range or more. Theaters began to phase out carbon arc lights and then the even older lime lights. Those were lights that used and oxygen hydrogen gas to heat up a piece of lime so that it would glow.

They would get rid of those in favor of incandescent spotlights. And it's hard for us to get a full appreciation of how these changes allowed for new artistic expression, because now we live in an era where that is commonplace, and it's hard for us to remember that this had a pro found effect on audiences at the time, because again, we're used to it. But one example of how transformative these techniques would be involves an actor and theater manager

named David Belasco. Like Sir Henry Irving, who I spoke about in our last episode, he was known for producing plays that didn't always meet with critical approval from a textual standpoint, but they were technically magnificent. Blasco was similarly known for his theatricality, if not for his contributions to high drama. Unlike Irving, however, Belasco didn't issue electric lights. Irving only wanted gas lights. Belasco went with electric lights.

Belasco would end up producing a staging of the play Madam Butterfly, and in this production, he used a white backdrop at the back of the stage and he could light that in different ways to simulate various effects. In Madam Butterfly that included a fourteen minute sequence that featured a simulation of the passing of time by lighting the backdrop to mimic a sunset the night and then the

subsequent sun rise. And one of the people who saw this production was the great Giacomo Antonio Domenica Michelle Secondo Maria Puccini, or Puccini for short. He's an Italian composer famous for his operas. Puccini didn't understand very much English, but he was so impressed by the artistic display he saw in that theater that he decided to adapt the

story into an opera Madama Butterfly. And presumably without the theatricality to help convey the emotion and intent of those scenes, that never would have happened, we would not have that opera. Blasco's fame largely centered on his sense of the theatric and he was known for incorporating many complicated technical processes

to create effects in the theater. His name on a production was enough to sell tickets, even as drama critics sometimes lamented that the material he chose wasn't necessarily elevated. But there's no doubt that his work really pushed lighting into a new level as far as theatrical presentations are concerned. One thing I mentioned in the previous episode was the use of gels or color filters to create different effects.

These are transparent sheets of a colored material and they fit in front of a lens of a light source. So light comes out hits this filter and then you get uh color of light coming out of the end of your of your light source. And the colors can simulate different types of natural light or they can create other effects. And we had come a long way from using bottles filled with different colors of liquid in front of candles that had transitioned to pains of stained glass

and then later lacquer gelatine. But what is gelatine. Well, gelatine is a tasteless protein produced from collagen, which is a connective tissue found in animals, like in our skin, the ligaments, all that kind of stuff. There's lots of collagen there. So this is a structural protein that helps hold stuff like well, us together. In Star Wars, they talk about how the force binds us. But when we're talking about animal bodies, we really shouldn't talk about the forest.

We should talk about collagen, and that collagen is the base material for gelatin, which we use in all sorts of stuff, including and primarily in food products. If you've enjoyed a bowl of jello or a gummy bear, chances are you were scarfing down gelatin. Frequently, producers will take the byproducts from other processes, like from a slaughter house.

So in a way, you can think of gelatine as a method for us to make sure we use more of the animals were slaughtering for stuff like you know, meat production or leather or whatnot, So you can think of it as avoiding waste. To produce gelatine, you gotta take animal parts like the bones and skins of stuff like pigs and cows. Those tend to be the animals

that we use to make gelatine. And then you've got to boil this stuff for a really long time, typically in the presence of a weak acid, and as it boils, the collagen breaks down into gelatine. There's a lot of filtration and purification that has to follow before you can get to the industrial gelatine that we produced today, but generally speaking, that's the process anyway. One of the other things people use gelatine for was to make this transparent

film that could be dyed different colors. The film would be used as the color filter for theatrical lights, and because they were made from gelatine, the industry began to refer to them as gels, and you can find gels and theater and TV film productions just regular video productions. But these days they are not made out of gelatine, and there's some good reasons for that. Gelatine, while cheap and relatively easy to produce, isn't the most resilient material.

It could dissolve if it got wet, and it didn't stand up to the intense heat generated by lights for very long, so you would have to replace those gels fairly frequently. Now it doesn't really melt, but it does char and it also gets super brittle as it gets heated, so you would only get a little use out of

one before it would break and require a replacement. Still, the development of gels gave directors and lighting designers more options, and they would be used in the industry up through the mid nineteen seventies, even after engineers developed other solutions. Another lighting accessory that emerged was the gobo. A gobo is a screen that has designs cut into it to

create a special lighting effect. For example, you might have a screen that has the shape of leaves cut into that screen, and when you place that in front of a light, the screen allows light to pass through the cutout shape and that gets projected onto the stage. That is where Gobo Fraggle's name comes from, the Gobo. By the nineteen twenties, we started seeing some of the earliest textbooks dedicated to lighting, such as Theodore Fuchs. Stage lighting

seems pretty straightforward. It was around this time that some theaters began to incorporate a special kind of lens in theater lights to provide a more focused beam. The lens is called the Frenelle lens. That's spelled f r E s in e L. But it's named after Augustine Jean Frenell. Now he didn't actually invent this particular lens. That honor goes to George Louis le Clerc de Boeufon, who proposed this in seventeen forty eight. But what the heck is

a Frenel lens? Well, first, we need to remember that the purpose of any lens is to redirect light. By creating a lens with a specific curvature, you can bend light coming from one side of the lens so that it exits the other side of the lens in a

specific way. Eyeglasses do this. Eyeglasses bend incoming light, so that ends up hitting the retina in the back of the eye correctly to correct for some you know issue with the shape of the cornea, and the cornea is either directing light too far forward or too far behind the retina, which messes with our focus and it creates

either far sidedness or near sightedness. Now, good old Georgie Boy proposed that you can make a lens by cutting concentric rings of grooves on one side of a pane of glass, and that would end up using less glass than a conventional lens. Lenses tend to be you know, bulb bus They're actually named after lentils, So if you think of the shape of a lentil, that's why we call lenses lens. They were thought they look kind of

like lentils. But that means that lens is particularly big ones for big, big lights get really heavy because you've got that thick glass to deal with. Well, George, he thought, what if we take a pane of glass and we cut grooves in it to redirect light, and we'll just make sure that each groove is positioned in such a way that as light hits the back of that lens, it gets redirected towards the center. And this was a really clever idea. Of the concentric circles act as refracting surfaces.

They all bend those parallel light rays into a common focal length, and otherwise that would require a much thicker traditional lens. Each ring of this lens focuses the light hitting that section towards the center, and for Nell's contribution was to actually take this type of lens and install them in lighthouses to produce that powerful focused beam rather

than a more diffuse one. So if you ever think about what it looks like when you see the the beam of light emerging from a lighthouse, that's because the light is passing through Fennell lenses. The you of Frenelle lenses in theaters was so new in the mid nineteen twenties that that stage lighting textbook that I mentioned it from nineteen twenty six, it didn't even have an inclusion of Frenelle lenses in it, although they were starting to get used around that time, and while a few theaters

were making use of the Frenelle lens. The popularity of it would really take off in the nineteen thirties. It significantly reduced the weight of the lights that were being used, and it also created a more concentrated beam that could be directed towards the precise location. So this was a

big advancement in lighting now. In the early nineteen thirties, a lighting designer named Stanley McCandless published a textbook on stage lighting, and this would be the beginning of many of his contributions to the greater knowledge and expertise on lighting techniques for the stage, and many referred to McCandless as the father of modern stage lighting, though at least some of the sources I have encountered also suggests that the those techniques really belonged to another era of theater,

that in the modern era we're starting to see a move away from those techniques, and that it's probably a good thing. We always want to see art evolve. McCandless argued that stage lighting really serves four purposes visibility, form, naturalism, and mood. That is, any decision made by a lighting designer should be done with the goal of fulfilling at least one of those four functions. If the light serves no purpose belonging to one of those four categories, then

it's a distraction it shouldn't be used. On top of that, McCandless was working on designs that relied on the technology of the time, which mostly were all about lights that were mounted on rigs that had to remain stationary. Now, these lights typically hang from rigs that are above the stage, often in front of the stage, and they might be masked from view of the audience or they might be

in full view. The lights typically hang from a scaffold like structure called a box boom, not a boom box that's a different thing, and they're mounted in housings that have points of articulation. So during the rehearsal process, the lighting designer's crew will carefully hang and aim each light

toward the stage per the designer's direction. And because a production might need to represent many different lighting moods, perhaps to simulate different environments and different times of day, the crew might have to hang lights close to each other and then repeat the process of aiming each one at this particular point on the stage many many times, and once the lights are all in position, they pretty much

stay that way. For decades, there was really no way to redirect light in the middle of a show, with the exception of perhaps follow lights or spotlights, and those would require a human being to operate those manually. Instead, the tech crew would control which lights were on during any given scene using the switchboard, so lighting could change from one moment to the next, but the lights themselves would remain stuck in whatever position the crew had put

them in. You wouldn't have lights move from one part of the stage to another, they would just be in that one static angle. By the way, a little side note, I used to do this for my high school. I was in a couple of shows back in high school shortly after the invention of theater, and I was also

a scrawny little kid back in those days. And our main light rig our box boom was tucked away in a little kind of hidden chamber up above the first few rows the audience, and it was just big enough for a tiny little person like I was to crawl back there and position the lights. And when I was doing it, the work was really hot, it was stuffy, it was dusty, and it was hard. Plus I was perched on a tiny little ledge above a twenty ft drop or so down to the floor with no real

way to secure myself. Good times. Mccannle would go on to publish many more textbooks on stage lighting, becoming the foremost authority in the field for many years. The basic principle of the McCandless method is to light each area of a stage where actors are going to perform with two lights from above and each at an angle of forty five degrees to the stage and on either side

of the center of the performance area. This creates an effect that makes more shadows and enhances the sense of separation of the actors from the background, makes it more three dimensional, and that is better than just lighting actors from the front that tends to create a more flattening effect. Now, I promise we're nearly getting done with stage lighting. When we come back, i'll talk about a few more advances that would follow, and then we'll transition towards film and television.

But first, let's take a quick break. Around ninety three, stage theaters begin and to use ellipsoidal lights. And this is the type of light that I had to work with when I was in high school. So what the heck is an ellipsoidal light. Well, an ellipsoid is a type of shape, and it's what you get if you have a sphere and then you deform that sphere. So imagine you've got an inflatable beach ball and you press down on it, the ball deforms, and now you've got

yourself a type of ellipsoid. So an ellipsoid light has a bulb that sits in a reflector, and that reflector is ellipsoidal in shape. The reflector typically is made up of little panels of reflective material, though it can be smooth, and the whole purpose of this is to direct light out through the lens in a very focused, concentrated beam. And this is really effective when it comes to directing as much light that that bulb can put out as

possible toward the stage. Around this time, the bulbs that were in use were largely in the one thousand, fifteen hundred and two thousand what range. And again those incandescent bulbs that we used to light our houses, those typically were in thirty forty five or sixty watts, So this

is way way way brighter. Now. The Kleigel Brothers produced an ellipsoidal Cleague light that stage theaters used, and the Polo Grounds in New York purchased Cleague lights in nineteen thirty three for a production of Romance of the People, and that is one of the earliest, if not the earliest use of Cleague lights in the theater. Around the nineteen forties, another advance would change lighting a bit, and this was the development of color filters made not out

of gelatin but acetate. Acetate is a synthetic polymer, and the polymer is a long chain molecule. Acetate falls into the category of thermoplastics and it's used in lots of stuff, including glue, but it can also be used to make thin sheets of transparent material that can then be dyed and like jella, and it's super cheap to produce, so it became a standard in stage lighting around or so.

But next on our list is an invention that would necessitate yet another shift in color filters, and that next big thing is the halogen light, which really started getting its use in the theater and film industries in the late nineteen sixties. Now, if you're a bit rusty on your chemistry, the halogens are a group of chemically related elements There groups seventeen on the periodic table, and they include fluorine and chlorine and bromine and iodine and a

couple of others. And the word halogen comes from too Greek roots, how which means salt and gen which means to generate or to produce. And yes, all these elements produce sodium salts. There's sodium chloride for example, that's table salt. They also have another property that makes them really useful at high temperatures. They can combine with tungsten vapor, and tungsten is the substance of choice to serve as the

filament in incandescent bulbs. Now, the idea of using a halogen gas in this case it would be chlorine back in lamps that that dated all the way back to the eighteen eighties. Chlorine gas very dangerous stuff, by the way, But it wasn't until General Electric patented technology in the nineteen fifties, this time with iodine as the gas, that we started seeing these kind of lights go into production. Halogen bulbs are a bit different from incandescent bulbs in

a few important ways. First, as we've covered, they contain a halogen gas rather than the inert gases in incandescent bulbs, they are also much smaller and the bulb part the what would normally be glass with an incandescent bulb is actually a little envelope that's made out of quartz, and it has to be made out of something other than glass because halogen lights give off enough heat to melt glass.

Just as with an incandescent bulb, the tungsten filament inside to halogen lamp heats up through resistance and then incandescence, and it also begins to vaporize. Bits of tungsten actually evaporate off of that filament. But with halogen lights, the tungsten vapor combines with the halogen gas and at a high enough temperature and interesting reaction begins to occur. The gas will start to redeposit the vaporized tungsten onto the filament.

Now with light bulbs incandescent light bulbs, you can actually see the deposits of the tungsten on the inside of the glass bulb. That's why they get dark after a light bulb burns out, like they had a little dark spot. Well, with halogen lights you actually get a recycling process. The vaporized tungsten is returned to the filament that actually extends

the useful life of the bulb. Halogen lights will last much longer than incandescent lights of a you know, equivalent brightness, and you can run the lights at a higher wattage with halogen bulbs, So that also means you can produce more light as a result, and that is perfect certain applications like a car's headlights, or stage lights, or film

and television production lights. But there was one problem. Halogen lights get so hot that you couldn't use acetate color filters on halogen lights because the acetate would just melt. So the industry shifted to more durable polymer based products, like a polyester based material or milar polycarbonate. Neither the acetate sheets nor these newer materials were related to gelatin,

the original stuff that everyone used. But everyone kept on using the term gel to describe these color filters, so even though it was no longer even remotely gelatin, the name gel stuck. Another big innovation that plays an important role not just on stage and screen, but in our

everyday lives is the dimmer switch. Now, for a long time, you pretty much had two choices when it came to your lights, they were either off or they were on, and when they were on, they were as bright as they could be until they burnt out and that was it. But the dimmer switch allows you to control the intensity of light, moving from gradations between wow, it sure is dark in here to uh, holy cats, that's a bright light.

But how does a dimmer switch work Well, the earliest demmer switches worked on the principle of a variable resistor. So a resistor is an element in a circuit that resists the flow of electricity. It doesn't prevent electricity from flowing, but it does make it, you know, harder for current to flow through. If we think about it in an analogy, like in terms of friction. You can imagine something like a floor that has a very rough carpet on it, and it would be very hard for you to shuffle

your suck footed feet across such a floor. And like friction, we see some of the energy that used to be in one form convert into heat. That heat is lost. So a variable resistor is a component that has an adjustable electrical resistance. You can change the amount of resistance there. Typically you would have a piece of resistive material, and you would have a static contact arm. That means it's stationary, it's not moving anywhere, and you would also have a

movable contact arm. Now the stationary contact arm is connected to one end of this resistive material, and you know, because it's stationary can't move. The movable contact arm can slide along the length of this resistive material. You can make it very close to that first contact or you can make it further away. So if you create more distance between the two contact arms, that means the electricity has to move through this resistive material in order to

complete the circuit, to go through the full circuit. But if you decrease the distance between the two contact arms, then the amount of resistance that the current has to deal with also decreases. This is a fairly elegant solution, though primitive. So, since the resistor converts some of the electrical energy into heat, we see a voltage drop in the circuit, and that means less energy is available to power the low on that circuit, which in our case

is a lamp. So the reduced amount of energy means the lamp doesn't have the juice to put out a full blast of light, and you get less light. As a result, Modern dimmer switches are a little more complicated than this, and that requires a quick explanation of alternating current. So direct current is pretty easy to understand. You've got a circuit that acts kind of like a one way street. Electricity can go down the street, but it can't go back the way it came. One terminal is always negative,

the other one is always positive. That is easy to understand. With alternating current, the positive and negative connections switch many times per second, and that means the current flowing through the system is reversing direction every single time that happens. Now, I've done episodes explaining why the world moved toward alternating current, specifically for transmission purposes, so I'm not going to go into that here, but it means you can think of voltage of an A C circuit as a sign wave.

The center line represents zero voltage, and the tallest point above and below the center line represents the peak voltage, which we would represent with both a positive value for the side that's above the line and a negative value for the site that's below the line. In the US, you would have sixty of these sign waves connected to represent one second of A C transmission because it's a it's a one and twenty volt a C that's sixty positive and sixty negative. But they don't cancel each other out.

They're actually additive. It's a little confusing. Modern dimmer switches effectively chop up this sign wave and they shut off the light circuit every time the current dips below a certain voltage in the A C circuit. Then they turn on again once the voltage climbs up above the value.

So if you think of like a a roller coaster hill, so every time the roller coaster dips down a certain level, the lights go out, and every time the roller coaster comes up past that certain level, the lights come on again. That's essentially what these dimmer switches are doing in a way. So by a see the dimmer, you adjust the voltage value at which the circuit will turn off or turn back on again. Now there's a lot more to it than that, including a semiconductor device called a trayack, but

that's a story for another time. Another big invention that would end up being important for all sorts of applications, not just stage lighting, was the development of multiplexing, and this refers to the practice of sending multiple signals over the same medium, typically a wire, simultaneously, and the telephone

system does this. If it weren't for multiplexing, only one set of signals could go over the same line at the same time, which means you would need a whole bunch of different cables to handle everything, and as systems got more complex, you would have a real mess on your hands. Like imagine that you would have to have a phone line direct from your house to everyone you know in order to be able to have your conversation.

They would have to have one to use so that their signal could come back to you because it couldn't be on the same line as the signal going to them.

That's a huge headache. So multiplexing was already a thing with a telephone system, but it wasn't until the nineteen seventies that the Strand Century created a protocol called a m X one nine two for stage lighting, and it was called a m X because the system allowed for the creation of one two different channels of signals across the same pair of wires, and that significantly cut down on the complexity of circuits that were necessary to control

multiple stage lights, including the use of demmers, which previously required their own dedicated wires. There are lots of different methodologies for multiplexing, but it all gets really terribly complicated and it would require its own dedicated episode to it. So I'm going to spare all of us for now. I'm skipping over tons of tweaks and fine tuning to the various technologies that made up stage lighting because honestly, a lot of them, while really important, I don't want

to diminish them in any way. They're really important from for the technical opera ration of theaters. However, they represent relatively minor changes from a technological point of view. So I would argue that the next really big development for stage lighting came out in the nineteen eighties with motorized

moving lights. So the mountings for these lights are automated and motorized so operators can move them with electronic controls rather than having to actually manually manipulate the lights so that they're pointed wherever you need them to go. Now, most theaters don't actually have that set up. It's really expensive, it can break down and then you've got to fix everything.

So this is sort of the type of thing you might see in a really fancy theater or maybe in arena shows, but your typical theater will rely on the old box boom, scaffolding and hanging lights that have to be adjusted manually, and that's all done during the rehearsal process.

We also saw the emergence of various computer systems that would allow crews to program light settings so that the crew can automatically switch from one queue to the next, rather than having to hit a bunch of switches manual lee. So during the tech rehearsal, the light crew gets all the lights adjusted the way the lighting designer and the director want them to be, and that includes where the lights are pointed, how bright they are, whatever gels or

go bos are on them. And once it's all set and you know exactly which lights you want for that particular queue, the crew will then designate that set up on a switchboard like you could think of it as Q one, and you press a button and Q one comes up and those lights come on at that intensity. So when the crew selects that setting, that set up lights up, and then when they switch to the next setting,

it goes to a totally different set of lights. You know, so very great way to keep things nice and streamlined. The crew just has to really pay attention to make sure that they're activating the correct Q as the show progresses. So it's a remarkable innovation. Today it's possible to have a fully motorized computer controlled light system, including light that have special peripherals that turn into color slide projectors and

stuff like that. And the industry has also seen advances and multiplexing, so now it's possible to run more than five hundred channels of signals across a group of about five wires. And all of this is really impressive, but it's really tough for us to pull down the curtain on stage lighting so we can switch over the film and TV lighting. And we're gonna do that after this

quick break. Okay, finally we're gonna get into talking about lighting for film and television, and a lot of what I have to cover really just overlaps with stage lighting. I'm not gonna double dip. I'm not gonna re explain stuff you guys have just heard. Instead, let's build upon what has already come before. It does mean that we do have to jump back a little bit just before the turn of the twentieth century, However, and this also means that we need to remind ourselves about the nature

of photographic film. So this is a material that's been treated with photoreactive chemicals, and that means that these chemicals undergo a reaction when they're exposed to light. Through the careful exposure of this material to light, you can create a record of the light that was present in that environment. And since everything we see is really just light reflecting off of various objects, that means you can create a visual record of what someone would see were they in

the camera's position at that particular time. Early photographic film wasn't terribly good at capturing light, or rather, it was fine, but it took time because the chemical process wasn't very efficient and it needed to absorb as much light as it possibly could before the shutter on the camera closed. In the end, the shutter as the way to control when the light hits the film and when it's dark, because if you just kept the light on all the time,

you would eventually have an unrecognizable photo. Now, we have not developed, no pun intended, the right chemical for this process to make it super fast, so you couldn't just snap a shot and the shutter would open up in the fraction of a second, and the camera lens would bring light in expose some film to light, and then the shutter snaps closed and again. It all took place in the blink of an eye, and you would end up with a perfect photograph that was just not possible

in the old days of photography. Exposure required many seconds or even minutes, which is why people in those old photographs looks so darned dour, because you would have to sit for several minutes for a photograph to be taken,

and holding a smile would get uncomfortable pretty quickly. But over time, engineers and chemists created a film that could capture an image in a fraction of a second as long as there was enough light coming in through the camera lens to hit the film with the proper intensity. If there wasn't enough light, the image would be dim and maybe even impossible to make out, so lighting was

incredibly important. Many early films were shot outdoors because a sunny day provide did the light that was needed for film to capture images effectively. They couldn't really managed to do that inside. Indoor lighting just wasn't up to snuff. One of the early attempts at shooting indoors was Thomas Edison's special eighteen two studio called Black Mariah. This was a building that was mounted on a rotatble base and it had a retractable roof that would allow sunlight to

come in. The crew could actually rotate the building so that it would follow the progress of the sun and this would keep the studio lit throughout both the morning and the afternoon. Edison could have the roof opened to different degrees, and he also used curtains to control the lighting so that he could shoot sequences indoors and get

the effects he wanted. There were crew who would use long poles with hooks on the end of those polls, and they would hook those curtains to be able to pull the curtains further apart or allow them to fall together, and they would do this as de erected and those polls are known as gaffs. That's a term that comes not from the theater, but from sailing. Sailors used gaffs to grab hold of a line or rope that might be out of reach, like a line has fallen in

the water. You grab a gaff, you've got a hook on the end, you hook the rope, you bring it back over so you can do whatever you need to do with it. So the crew responsible for manipulating the curtains ended up getting called gaffers because they were using these gaffs. That term would stick around in the film industry. Today, we use it to refer to the chief lighting technician on set, and they're also the head of the electrical department.

It's also important to remember that with film, there's no way to know if what you are capturing on that film is what you're actually seeing in person until you go through the whole process of developing that film. A lot of early cinematography was trial and error to determine how much light was necessary to get clear images. So if you made the wrong call, you would end up with a bunch of useless footage, but you wouldn't know that what you had was useless until you developed the film.

In eight a filmmaker named Oscar Mester opened up an indoor studio in Berlin. He relied on artificial lights, primarily carbon arc lights. Just like the stage theaters were the lights needed to be powerful, which also meant they were large, they were really hot. They were difficult to operate and they required a lot of electricity, and this would be

true for much of the early days of cinematography. Another type of light that was used in early cinema, usually to complement the carbon arc floodlights, were the mercury vapor lights. These are kind of similar to fluorescent lights today. So you've got an air tight tube inside which are your electrodes, and you have a mixture of air and mercury vapor and typically are gone and those are all at normal atmospheric pressure. In fact, the mercury vapor at normal temperature

is liquid, it's not gas at all. So you have a separate electrode and that ionizes the argon on gas when you supply electricity to this bulb, and that creates an electrical arc that heats up the mercury and turns it into vapor. It evaporates, it also ionizes, and once it's ionized, then it's a gas that's capable of conducting electricity.

So now the arc can travel through the mercury, and initially as the bulb starts to heat up, it will give off a violet and then a blue glow, and if it gets hot enough, the pressure increases enough, it will start to give off photons of other colors and it will produce a light that's sort of white ish. Was also the year that the Klegal brothers founded their stage lighting company, and they would play an enormous role

in the history of film lighting. And I mentioned the Kleague light earlier, and that term has been used to refer to lots of different lights. In fact, all the lights that the Klegel brothers created were called Kleague lights. But even more confusing than that, people in the industry will use the word Kleague light to refer to any major light that are using to light a scene, so it could be used for floodlights and spotlights and all

sorts of stuff, and that gets super confusing. But generally we're talking about a light that had an ellipsoidal reflector and a frenelle lens to create intense beams of light that could be used to light scenes for film. And the source of the light in the early Kleague lights was a carbon arc light, so that pair of carbon electrodes with the electric arc between them. However, later the Klegal brothers would move toward incandescent and then halogen lights.

Uh and again these lights didn't always come from the Kleigal brothers, but as I said, the term was used to describe more of a form factor than an actual manufacturer, kind of like how everyone refers to copy machines as Xerox machines even if they're not made by Xerox, or everyone refers to tissue paper as Kleenex, even if it doesn't come from clean X. The light produced by these things was so bright it was bright enough to cause

damage to your eyesight. There were actually cases of actors who suffered damage to their eyes as a result of this. They would even call it clee guy in the industry. They would have to. If you had to film in front of these things for too long, then you had really a danger of hurting your eyes as a result. The carbon arc lights could provide the brightness needed, but they were also really noisy. Now that wasn't a problem early on, but they did have to go once talking

pictures came around. You wouldn't be able to hear anything otherwise, So that was when the industry saw a shift towards incandescent lights, which could operate at a much quieter level than a carbon arc light. And like I said, other companies began to manufacture lights for the film industry, but on sets, the term cleague light was pretty much used universe later refer to big lights used to light sets,

no matter where they came from. So these lights were designed with specific purposes in mind a lot of the time, like to mimic sunlight or something. Other lights might just be used to illuminate a scene, but they all followed similar paths as the stage lights have already talked about in the this episode in the previous episodes, so we're not gonna go through every variation. Film, TV and video production would see other lighting elements come into play, such

as bounce boards. A bounce board is a reflective surface that can bounce light back onto a subject. This is helpful when you're working with a limited number of lights, or it would be impractical to hang or position more lights, like there's just nowhere where you could easily put them where they would both be out of the frame of the picture and also still get light to where you're going. So, as someone who has done a lot of video work,

I can tell you I hate bounce boards. Typically you've got some member of the crew whose job is to hold the bounce board and position it in a way where it will reflect back on a person and I hate that person, not because of who they are, but because of what they have to do to me. And if you're already in a video, if you've ever done this yourself, you know you're already being lit at a

level that seems ludicrous. It seems like it's way too much light, but it's actually all necessary to get good effect on film or video because the light captured by cameras is only a fraction of what light is actually there. It's not necessarily super dark compared to what reality is, but it's definitely darker. So if you want a well lit scene in the final product, you're gonna need to light the heck out of it when you're actually shooting it.

This is true even if you're doing something like making YouTube videos or live streaming. There are a lot of YouTubers and twitch streamers out there who have special lights to create nice, even well lit images for their viewers. It might be a ring light that goes around the cameras of the camera shoots through the ring and that way the light isn't affecting the lens directly, but you get a nice illumination, or it maybe separate stands of L A D lights. It really does make a huge difference.

If you find someone just starting out who hasn't had the chance to invest in lights, you can tell. And if you find someone who has the means to light their set up, well it really stands out. Now I'm running out of time, so I can't really get into stuff like LED lights that requires its own separate discussion. I'll have to say that for another episode. But cinematography and lighting are so entwined that it's impossible to really talk about one without mentioning the other. A dramatically lit

scene is a true work of art. One of my favorite scenes that plays with light and darkness comes from The Prestige, which is an okay movie, but there's a great moment with a Hugh Jackman and Andy Cirkus as they're standing out in a field of light bulbs that Tesla is supposedly illuminating through wireless power, and it's just a really great scene that shows how how effective lighting

can really punctuate the emotional intent of a scene. I'll conclude this episode with a very quick rundown on some terms and lighting and filmmaking. But just keep in mind that we've pretty much covered the basics of the technology, so here we go. We talked about gaffers, but what about best boy. So the best boy refers to an assistant, and typically it's the assistant to the gaffer or the

head of lighting. There are also best boy positions that can be assistance to the key grip, and the best boy is in charge of keeping track of stuff like where equipment happens to be, where the crew are. It's a lot of paperwork, it's a lot of management and supervision. It's logistics, and this frees up the gaffer to light the ding dang darn scene. So the gaffers they're doing design work and making decisions, and the best boys job is to make sure that everything is where it needs

to be when it needs to be there. As for the name itself, well that's something more of a mystery. There are explanations, mind you, of where best Boy came from, but they might be apocryphal. However, the generally accepted origin is that in the old days of filmmaking, when someone on crew needed a hand, they would send a message over to some other department and they would say send

over your best boy to lend a hand. The idea being that the other department head gets the message and picks out somebody who is best suited to do whatever the job is that needs doing. Now, Is that true? Beats the heck out of me? All right? Some other terms three point lighting. This refers to using three separate lights to illuminate your subjects so that it or they or whatever stands out from the background. It's to give it definition so that it doesn't just fade right into

the background. Key light This is the light that is the most prominent in the frame. So if you look at a single frame from a film or show, let's say it's an interior shot, you should be able to tell just by looking at that picture where the key light is, because it's going to be the light that's

providing the brightest spot in that frame. So if it's a close up on someone and say the upper right side of their face is really really bright compared to the rest, you know that that's where the key light was pointed. Then you have fil lights. These are lights that the name suggests that they're used to help fill in the shadows that otherwise would really be in frame.

So like, if you've ever used a flashlight to do the spooky face thing, you know, you hold the flashlight directly under your face in the dark and you start talking like spooky voice. I know I'm not the only one who's done that, right, tell me I'm not that weird. Well, if you do that, you get these really really dramatic shadows. Well, obviously, you know the lights are using in film and television. They're super bright, and the shadows that would be cast

would be really really sharp. So phil lights help remove some of that stark contrast. They're not meant to evenly light someone all over necessarily, but they do cut back the intensity or the contrast between the light and dark sides of a scene. A backlight is typically used to help light the rear portion of whatever it is you're filming, and these lights are usually elevated and they're usually pointing downward. Uh.

You might also have a kicker light. Those can be used to create a rim of light that can provide almost like a halo effect on a subject. You might also hear terms like soft lighting versus hard lighting that generally refers to how light and shadow appear in the frame. So an image with that has subtle shadows would have soft lighting. One that has really dramatic shadows, like like the band of light that regularly appears across Captain Kirk's

eyes and old Star Trek episodes. That's hard lighting. And those are just a few terms in the lighting world. Now. I know I didn't spend a ton of time focusing just on film and TV lights, but again, that's because those technologies grew out of the world of stage lighting. So by understanding stage lighting, we really understand how film and TV lights work. Things get a little more complex

these days. I mean, you've got a lot of very specific style lights to create different effects, way more than you did back in the old stage days. But they all basically do the same thing. They just do it in a very specific set of parameters. I hope this episode and the previous one we're interesting to you. I always love talking about the entertainment industry. It's got a place in my heart. I've been an actor and a writer for that industry before. Nothing major, like more on

an amateur level. I don't want to toot my own horn. It's not like you're gonna go and find some amazing piece of work that I've been in, but I have an ongoing fascination with it. If you guys have suggestions for future topics I should cover in episodes of tech Stuff, get in touch with me and let me know. The handle for the show on Twitter is text Stuff H. S W. I look forward to hearing from you, so please leaves. If you've got a suggestion, shoot it my

way and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.