Beijing's Lights

This just went out to a reader who'd asked whether I'd had any ideas about the lighting design for the Beijing Olympics opening, and then followed-up by disclaiming the "stupid" question.

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I'd been about to point out that they did it all right, from where I saw it way out here in the cheap seats. The fact is that something like that proceeds from very elementary premises, something like: "What are we trying to say here? What's the theme?... the point?" Lighting designers often have a great deal of their work implicitly dictated to them by things like set and costume design. It can be a very "If/Then" relationship to the rest of the production: "If this is going to be onstage, Then this is what we must do for it." How to do it is the margin where style exists.

Sometimes, the elementary ideas are just cocktail napkin sketches. (There is a reason why the "Stonehenge" bit of "Spinal Tap" is so ass-clenchingly funny.) "We need to play the Olympic Rings in the middle of the stadium." -- the original idea is very often just that simple and nebulous. It will often develop in consonance with the rest of the show:

"Hey! We have all these flying line-sets in the middle of the stadium, so we'll fly the Rings!"

"Yeah... we can do them in No Color LED's on a scrim."

(Note: all this dreamy stuff has hardware implications that someone is going to have to resolve, sooner or later. I've had people answer tough fabrication questions with, "I'm a designer. Don't come to me with your hardware problems." So: now we have a scrim with LED's laying on the floor. It's going to play while it's laying flat, and also while it flies away. "What's the performer traffic look like while it's on the deck? If it's very busy down there, then we might want to power the thing from under the deck because we don't want dancers running around getting tangled in power lines coming down in the fly-rigging, but, it's going to play in the air, too, so that would involve a power-supply swap in the dark before it flies."

I'd have to look at it again, but I think they powered it from the fly-rig. I guarantee you, though, that that discussion or something very much like it took place early on as they were dreaming this stuff up.

So, once we've established the elements of the LED panel on the floor with the LED Rings scrim laying flat on top of it...)

"Hey! Listen, we could run a video at the LED Panel of all these No Color pixels swirling around on the floor and then they sort of coalesce at center while we fade-up the Rings LED scrim where it's laying flat on top of the Panel..."

I have no idea what that might sound like in Chinese, but this is how a cue like that is born. And it all proceeds from a hierarchy of principles regressing back to original values and concepts which are the purpose of the show. To seriously ask a question about how to do it differently is to question the nature and intent of what they actually did, at fundamental levels. There is always room for nit-picking around the non-essentials, although there's little point in trying to do that through the teevee.

It looked good. I can imagine what it looked like on the spot in ways that most can't. I mean, I slo-mo the viddie and count instruments on trusses. I note the positions of flying line-sets. Stuff like that. I'd like to see a two million square-foot field of RGB dichroically-mixed Congo Blue, all automated and cued, and watch it move like that.

It's been pointed out that this is the most politicized Olympics since Hitler's fest in 1936, and I think that's obviously right. With that in mind, however, the task of putting lights on the thing is pretty simple. There's an old saying in my business: "Light the money." This keeps grounded some people who sometimes lose their focus when grappling with large design problems: it reminds them what they're doing in the first place. Well, the propaganda was "the money" in the case of the other night, and I think the problem was solved very impressively.

I can't shake the point that there is no problem in my business that cannot be solved with money and manpower. It's true of all businesses, actually, but show business is special because "The show must go on." That's no idle platitude. I've seen days wasted weeks in advance come to flaming grief at the moment of showtime, when the place is full of kings: the people who bought tickets. When the production is behind schedule, there is a special mental and physical grind that takes on the implacability of war. One looks around, knowing the immutability of the clock, and concludes that the thing could be done with this many more bodies and/or that many more dollars.

Having worked all my life with such elements that were only ever brought to bear by way of voluntary market (a redundancy of terms, there) action, when they could be had by players of sufficient repute that the market granted them, Beijing leaves a rotten taste.

To ask me what I would do differently is to invite my contempt for slave-drivers.