ABSTRACT
Touring lighting designers, lighting directors and programmers are often brought along for their artist’s appearance at an outdoor music festival. For a lighting professional, the festival circuit can be challenging. Many acts perform in broad daylight, while the main artists start at sunset. A standard component of most festivals’ stage setups is video. The festival grounds are expansive, necessitating IMAG to allow over half the audience to reasonably see any of the performers. Designed-video content is a major part of most shows, as well. Also rapidly becoming a ubiquitous part of every large festival is a professional webcast operation with cameras, crew, directors, and producers to beam each performance around the world. The viewership numbers are staggering, and the importance, to the bands, of taking this seriously has become quite obvious to them, their managers, and their record companies. Therefore, the live shows—generally not designed for television—might require some degree of fine-tuning to optimize the look of the show for the webcast as well as for the gargantuan screens. This chapter will describe the conditions, the pitfalls, and the techniques to rapidly adjust a touring show’s lighting for streaming in just a few hours.
