Types of Theater Light Instruments
- Theater lighting involves various instruments for lighting the production.Theatre Lights image by Shannon Workman from Fotolia.com
Whether you're seeing a straight play or a Broadway musical, the lighting and lighting design play a large role in the experience. There are various lighting instruments involved in lighting a stage and some are only used in certain instances--a follow spot, for example, is used for emphasizing one particular actor for a certain amount of time during the show. - Spotlights light an actor or the stage in a small amount of light. The family of spotlights includes the following: fresnel, ellipsoidal, and the follow spot. Spotlights are capped with lenses.
- Floodlights light wide areas of the stage and the sets that you see at the back of the stage. The family of floodlights includes: scoops, box floods and strip lights. Most floodlights do not have lenses on top of the bulbs.
- Gels go over the bulbs and provide the color that you see on stage. Gels can be clear or colored--the colors of the gels that the lighting designer decides on helps to show the mood of the scenes, depict a place and time, and/or emphasize a particular actor.