Tools of the Trade

by Richard Cadena
Last week, like many times before, an eager, young lighting professional asked me for advice about how to reach his goals as a lighting designer. And just like all those times before, I searched deep in my lexicon looking for the magic words that would inspire him and propel him down his path to the top of the industry.

In his eyes I saw the same vortex of hopes, dreams, and desires that I had when I was in his shoes. And much like the way I felt back then, I sensed an eagerness in him to dispense with the inconvenience of a long and arduous grind up the ladder of success. Where is the magic bullet, I imagined he was thinking, that will pierce the armor of time and difficulty, and to make all things great happen post haste? Why can’t I be knighted into a posh gig with a huge salary and all the respect and admiration it affords?

I wish that I could shield every person like him from the harsh glare of the real world and excuse him or her from all of the hard work and long hours that it usually accompanies. Failing that, the next best thing is to offer a set of tools that will give him/her the best shot at finding what they’re looking for. The kit of tools I’m thinking of would include some magic beans, some elixir, potions, salve, and other remedies. Read on.

1. The magic beans will shade you against the heat of the real world by sprouting a deep love for and a fascination with your chosen field, because work you love is no work at all. When it’s in full bloom, you’ll be in full stride and you won’t break a sweat. "Let the beauty of what you love be what you do." - Rumi

2. The elixir will heal the blemishes of your failures and give you the courage to stretch your wings and try to fly, knowing good and well that you could crash and burn. Whether you fail or succeed, the elixir will help you to emerge at every turn as enthusiastic as ever. "I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge." - Igor Stravinsky

3. The potion will make you immune to the sting of your errors by erasing your memory of the mistakes you make without erasing the lessons you learn from them. It will give you the courage to take reasonable risks without preventing you from making mistakes so that you will have the benefit of knowing what does and doesn’t work. As Pablo Picasso once said, “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how not to do it.”

4. The salve will sooth the ache of following a crooked path. The unknowing seek the shortest distance between two points—where they are now and where they want to be—and the knowing know the shortest possible distance between those two particular points is a crooked line along an impossibly unpredictable precipice of a precarious career. "Rightly conceived, time is the friend of all who are in any way in adversity, for its mazy road winds in and out of the shadows sooner or later into sunshine, and when one is at its darkest point one can be certain that presently it will grow brighter." - Arthur Bryant

5. The remedy is a capsule full of determination. When you take a full dose, you’ll know that failure is just a milestone on the road to success. Everybody experiences failure from time to time, but successful people don’t let it stop them. http://bit.ly/create-persist

6. The infusion of mentoring is the best inoculation against an anemic career. You are unique and there is no one answer to all the questions you’ll have on your journey. Find a mentor who has been down the road you travel and seek advice when you need it.

What has worked for you in your career?

Greener Lighting for Greener Stages

by Richard Cadena

The typical 100-watt household incandescent lamp uses about a dollar’s worth of electricity to produce less than a nickel’s worth of light. The rest, about 97.4%, is radiated as infrared or pure heat, completely invisible to the human eye. Its overall luminous efficacy – the visible light output compared to the amount of power it takes – is about 17.5 lumens per watt compared to about 45 to 60 lumens per watt for a compact fluorescent lamp and slightly less for a typical LED profile luminaire. 

Coal Byproducts
About half of the world’s power plants are coal-fired, and they are the single largest source of carbon dioxide emissions on the planet. Some scientists believe that CO2 emission is the primary cause of global warming. Burning coal also releases other pollutants into the air. In addition to CO2, coal combustion byproducts include sulfur and many heavy metals like arsenic, barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, radium, selenium, vanadium, and zinc. The sulfur reacts with oxygen and water to produce sulfuric acid, which falls back to earth as acid rain, and the mercury released into the atmosphere is the single largest unregulated source of mercury. 

To power a 100-watt incandescent lamp from a coal-fired power plant an average of three hours per night every day for a year, which is approximately 1000 hours, it takes about 110 pounds of coal and produces about 200 pounds of CO2. If, instead, we replaced that 100-watt lamp with a 24-watt equivalent with a luminous efficacy of 50 lumens per watt, it would take about 26 pounds of coal to operate and it would produce about 48 pounds of CO2, a savings of about 84 pounds of coal and 152 pounds of CO2. 

But wait, there’s more…
In a closed system like a building or a room, all of the heat generated by a lamp has to be removed by the air conditioning system if the temperature is to remain the same. Doing so requires the use of even more electricity. 

For example, a 100-watt lamp gives off 341 British thermal units (BTUs) for each hour of use, which increases the heat load by the same. The impact of that heat and the amount of air conditioning needed to remove it depends on the efficiency of the air conditioner. An air conditioner with a seasonal energy efficiency ratio (SEER) of 7.5 will use 34.1 watt-hours of energy to remove that heat. In effect, it increases the energy consumption of this lamp by 34%, adding to the cost, CO2 emissions, and pollution.

Efficiency Pays
A church in Houston was originally built in the early 1970s and the lighting was upgraded in the mid-1980s. It had three stained glass windows that were backlit with 190 1000-watt cyc lights and there were 168 1000-watt PARs used for the house lights. By replacing cyc lights with 109 324-watt T5 fluourescent fixtures and the house lights with 575-watt ERS fixtures, the energy consumption was cut by 55%. In addition, the lower power consumption results in a lower air conditioning load, saving even more energy and money. With a conservative estimate of 20 hours per week of use, an electrical cost of $0.0986 per kilowatt-hour, and a SEER of 10, in a year’s time, the building owner will save about $28,600.

Before:

Total energy consumed: 392,080 kW-hours

Total thermal load: 1,286,377 BTUs

Annual cost of electricity for A/C: $13,191

Annual cost of electricity for lights: $38,659

After:

Total energy consumed: 175,848 kW-hours

Total thermal load: 576,942 BTUs

Annual cost of electricity for A/C: $7,275

Annual cost of electricity for lights: $21,320

Total Annual Savings: $28,595

Amount of coal saved annually: 119 tons

Amount of carbon dioxide saved annually: 218 tons

Coal-burning power plants also release arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, molybdenum, radium, selenium, vanadium, and zinc into the atmosphere. Saving energy not only saves money, it also makes good environmental sense.

Paul Smith Smashing Buttons

Paul Smith at work.

If you like technology, you'll love Ed Sheeran's show. Yes, I'm aware that Sheeran's fans are primarily young females, but I don't care. I think he writes great songs with great music and he sings like a choir of angels. Part of the reason is his loop pedal that he works like a magician. But what really tied it together for me was the combination of lighting and video.

At times, the show was quiet as a church service and at times it was a cacophony of percussion, strings, and vocals. The crazy thing is that there was only one person on stage, unless you count Sheeran's loop pedal, which he used to build songs live on stage. Technology, in the right hands, can be pure magic, and that's what it felt like when Smith's lighting and video helped heighten the experience and amplify the event. Although much of the show is pre-programmed into his MA Lighting grandMA2, Sheeran's antics on stage are often improvised, meaning that Smith plays along anticipating every pedal stomp and pawing of Sheeran's 23" guitar, which he does to perfection. Despite some lag time from the Vari-Lite 880s, his timing is impeccable.

A big part of the show is the video backdrop, which is made up of 1-meter LED panels driven by two Green Hippo Hippotizer media servers (one live and one backup). In the show I saw at Stubb's in Austin, only part of the rig could fit in the venue, and Smith warned me that some of the video might not make sense. But what made perfect sense was the way the lighting and video blended seamlessly and punctuated the music with bursts of Atomic 3K strobes situated behind the semi-transparent panels. 

It's a technologically-rich show, with powerful music and powerful imagery that fits together like a hand in a glove. And some of the best imagery comes from very simple looks using tricks like asymmetry, stark contrast, and great timing. During one song, the black and white video perfectly complemented the beams of white light and stood apart from the bright colors in the rest of the set. One of the best parts of the show comes when Sheeran asks the audience to turn on the lights on their cell phones and hold them up. Smith takes the lights to black and Sheeran stands on stage bathed in cell phone light, which resembles soft moonlight. It's a clever gag.

Paul Smith has been running lights for over 20 years and he does it with skill and class. His show is smooth as glass punctuated with the occasional flash and trash where required, but it's always in harmony with what's going on on the stage. 

Ed Sheeran on stage lit by nothing but cell phones from the audience.