One of the best ways to really upgrade your lighting show is to add movement.
The best part is – you don’t have to have moving lights in order to accomplish this!
In fact, you can use the intensity channel and color function to make movement in the room quite easily. Below, I want to highlight some examples of adding movement both with moving lights and with lights that don’t move:
In this video, you can see the lighting guy uses movement in a few different ways.
At :30 you can see 2 DJ lights turned on the create some moving light and color in an affordable way. I really like how the lighting person used it subtly to match the band’s energy.
Then, around 4 minutes, the band launches into a much heavier song. During this song, I really like the use of the DJ lights and strobe, though the strobe use seems a little erratic.
I’d like to see it used more rhythmically, but I don’t want to be too much of a backseat driver. You just never know what the lighting guy was doing at this time during the show – perhaps someone was bothering him about the volume level or trying to make a song request!
(For more ways to add movement without moving lights, click here)
In this video with the “6 Million Dollar Band”, pay attention to how they time the movement of the lighting with the music, and how they use their moving lights to bring a certain dynamic punch to the show.
They have really chosen their lighting well, and it makes their rig look really big, even though it’s not that large!
Even if they have a larger lighting rig than you, you can still take away some good pointers from their tight show. They are both tight as a band together and with their lighting, which is refreshing to see!
In this short clip, the band uses Enttec DMXIS to do audio control of their lights during this heavy portion of their show. While I wouldn’t advise running your strobe on sound-active the whole show, using it for heavy times can be a real great look!
The biggest takeaway in this video is this: you can make your lighting show look really good by having it well programmed and coordinated. Having a great console like DMXIS is a great starting point!
The video above is a scene that happens all-too-much in the band lighting world – getting the set list minutes (or seconds) before the show. Now, Jeff Waful is a really good lighting designer, and so of course he pulls off a tight show.
While it is very likely that you don’t have a rig that is this big. pay attention to how Jeff changes colors and moves his lights around very slowly at times – and fast at others.
Think about how you can incorporate changes like this into your show as you plan the lighting with your music.
