Tidbits

Here are some places I have recently taken notice of light where I wouldn't have before:

1. In playwriting class, one of the writers presented the beginnings of a science fiction play, in which a character "sucks all the light in the room into his body." When we gave feedback I mentioned that this would be a fascinating technical challenge. What would you do for that? Maybe bring all the other lights down while bringing up some backlights so it looks like the actor is glowing?

2. While walking over the library bridge I noticed that the sunlight shining through a gap in the railings made a pattern on the the ground that looked excitingly close to the shape of a Fresnel lens.

3.In the Fike studio where I take my Yoga class there are three light switches, and before class one day the teacher was fiddling with them to get the room appropriately dim. She finally achieved her objective, but not before switching on one look that caused one of the bulbs to flicker, which made me wish I knew how to make it stop flickering. Why do lights flicker? At crosspoint church it's because of the quirky dimmer. Or is it just bad wiring sometimes? Bad bulb?

Gran Torino

I saw the movie Gran Torino recently, and noticed a particularly interesting use of light as symbolism. The main character, Walt, makes allusions throughout the movie to a guilt he carries concerning an incident from when he was a soldier in Korea. He is persued by a young priest, who promised Walt's dying wife that he would get her husband to come to confession. At the end of the movie, when Walt is preparing to provoke his own murder, he goes to church and goes through the ritual of confession, but interestingly, only mentions mundane, little sins, making no mention of Korea. Viewers discover why when he takes his teenage neighber and mentee into the basement, trying to calm the boy's lust for vengeance against the gang members, and tells him what it was like to kill a man. He then locks the boy in the basement, and through the screen of the basement door makes his final confession- telling about the teenager he shot. During the scene, the light cast shadows on the boy's face so he looks like he is behind a confession screen. While the dialogue doesn't explain why Walt didn't tell the priest his story, the light effects reveal that he meant to absolve his sin in a more personal way.

Beginning Thoughts

People are affected by light. And they don't even know it.
If you had asked me four months ago how many different lighting looks were used during a regular church service, I would have thought about it and finally told you two.
Not true. There are several more that I had always responded to, but never noticed.
One Sunday I was standing in the tech booth right after the band had finished playing and the pastor was about to come up. The music was clearly over but everyone in the church remained standing. I then realized it was because the lights hadn't changed. I dutifully pushed the play button, the lights came up, and everyone sat down. The worshippers weren't thinking about the change; they automatically reacted.

My professor called this assignment a "Journal of Light."
It's how I am going to sensitize myself to this particle/wave and find out what I've been missing.It's how I'm going to notice when a lamp goes out or something onstage is flickering. And it's how I will investigate the role of light in how people live and think.