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Young Frankenstein Comes to Life with Help of ETC Eos Lighting Control
In that electrifyingly hilarious moment when the monster is shocked to life in the current Broadway production of Young Frankenstein, no effect is spared in Peter Kaczorowski’s lighting design. The stage visuals are achieved by a creative combination of projection, conventional and moving lights, with the elaborate automated rig controlled by an ETC Eos system.
Young Frankenstein’s extensive light plot is based around a mix of 120 Mac 2Ks – including performances, profiles and some washes. “Eos is great for handling a large rig like this,” says Josh Weitzman, moving light programmer for Young Frankenstein. “It has unique new tools that help you manage that size of rig and work really quickly.”
Young Frankenstein’s opening scene features dramatic flashes of lightning, which involve the use of both projection and lighting. “With projection,” explains Weitzman, “you can’t change the colour temperature of the lightning bolt; you’re limited to the tone the image is. So we layered the moving lights on top of the video projection. That gave us a great deal more control – in intensity of colour, in terms of strobing. I could make the light linger beyond the image without having to re-render the whole video. Similarly, in the play’s hayride scene, we were able to enhance the image and effect of the moon – deepening its tones, changing its textures, all by controlling the light that is layered over the video projection. And that kind of manipulation of light requires a versatile console like Eos.”
Of Eos’ new tools, Weitzman finds the Query function especially time-saving and helpful: “Let’s say you have a palette that’s called “Monster Down Left.” You can hit Query and then select that palette button, and it will grab all of the lights that are pointed at “Monster Down Left,” and you can then change the colours in them all at once – or change some other parameter. There might be different combinations and conditions used to build the query. You can then select any or all of the lights that meet the condition you describe.”
Weitzman finds Eos’s Trace button another indispensable tool for working on a production like Young Frankenstein: “I use this feature so much I can’t believe I programmed for years without it. It saves so much time. If you’re halfway through a scene and you decide with the designer that the lights should really be green here not blue, you can take that light to ‘green Trace’ and that change will go back to where the colour was originally set. You don’t even need to know what cue number you had stored that colour in.”
As Weitzman attests, it’s the nature of any production that many changes are made, both in the compressed preparation for the show and during its previews, until the ideal design solutions are found. “The better the board is able to accommodate you, the freer you are to try different things,” says Weitzman. “If it’s effortless, you find yourself trying many creative permutations. Being able to do them quickly in real time with the designer and the director looking on gives you the chance to try out more things than you otherwise would if you didn’t have the confidence to do things quickly. In the end you have a better production.”
This is a musical, of course, so the pacing of the lighting must also complement dance numbers. Says Weitzman, “Eos was a big part of making that work easily. You’re able to group fixtures together into parts of a cue. And then when they make an inevitable change in the choreography, and you have to change time or something like that, you can do that quickly and easily without affecting what the rest of the rig is doing. That’s pretty cool.”
The amount of interaction between the lighting, sound and music departments on Young Frankenstein was extensive – to coordinate things like lightning bolts, thunder effects and crescendos in the music. “Eos is often controlling the sound board, firing the sound effects, and the sound board is sometimes controlling the light board, and then they’re switching back and forth. Again, Eos was a piece of cake using ETC’s new Net3 Show Control Gateway to talk flexibly between all these different things.”
Opened on Broadway in November 2007, Young Frankenstein is a happy spectacle seeking monstrously memorable effects. The production continues to sell out seats and reap praise for its dazzling stagecraft and complex lighting design.
In picture: Roger Bart and Sutton Foster in Broadway production of Young Frankenstein photo: Paul Kolnik
14th February 2008
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