lighting with colour.
This live session for Ministry of Sound was all based around colour. Each live session had it's own colours and look but for this one we're looking at my favourite of the sessions, Kara Marni - Opposite.
Speaking of opposite, when you’re lighting with colour the lights need to be coming from opposite directions. The key to lighting with colour is that you have to control your lighting, It cant overlap or spill. If it overlaps it will bleach the colour out of it, mix enough colour light and you get white. Same goes for spill, any light spill will bleach the colour.
You also have to be careful about how you place the lights, all the normal lighting rules apply. If it wouldn't look good with white light then it’s not going to look good with colour light but with the added difficulty of having to be much more careful with light spill. Put eggcrates on everything!
It’s also important to think about what colours you are using and how they interact with styling or set design. Learning about colour theory is important too, knowing what colours go with each other is vital. It’s good to have a colour wheel to reference. Contrasting colours often work well, contrast makes images more interesting to look at and more striking.
When lighting with colour I like to go bold and defined with clear separation but you could go a lot softer with it too. It depends on the look you want. Sometimes I blend colours but that requires a ton more fine tuning and has to be very precise.
For this shoot we had some custom goal posts made that were part of the set, designed to create a forced perspective but they were also fully controllable RGB which could have chases programmed into them. These lighting strips are normally used joined together to create large TV screens but they were ideal for what we needed them for and had a super clean construction finish which alternatives like astera tubes lack.
Another aspect of the set was the mirrored monoliths. These were high gloss black plastic, which when viewed from a certain angle become mirrors which then extend the set either side and just look cool.
There was about 6 weeks of work on and off in designing the set. Originally I looked at building a forced perspective cage structure out of astera tubes but the sizes didn't work to create the forced perspective and the finish of the build would be too rough so we came up with the idea of these goal posts which could be built super clean. Detail is key.
