Backdrop

A backdrop is whatever sits behind a presenter. The choice is usually treated as decoration and is actually a technical one, because it determines how everything in front of it has to be lit and shot.

A black drape is the most forgiving. It absorbs light, so spill from the stage wash does not come back, and a subject lit from the front separates from it easily. It photographs as nothing, which is sometimes exactly right and sometimes reads as empty.

A printed backdrop puts branding in every camera shot and brings two problems: it needs its own light, separate from the light on the presenter, or it goes muddy; and anything printed on it directly behind a head is invisible for the whole show.

Hard scenic gives depth and shadow and takes time and trucks. An LED wall gives a backdrop that changes, and brings the opposite lighting problem — it is a light source, so the front light has to be strong enough to hold a face against it, and the wall’s own brightness has to come down for camera rather than being run at full.

The constant across all of them is the gap. A backdrop hard against the stage leaves nowhere for crew, cable or a presenter to pass behind, and no room to light it separately from the people in front of it.

Corporate event production — owned inventory, our own crew, and a site survey before anything is specified.

• Masking The drape that defines what the audience cannot see — legs at the sides, a border across the top, and the difference between a finished stage and a visible crew.
• Scrim An open-weave fabric that is a solid surface when lit from the front and transparent when lit from behind — the oldest reveal in the business, and the only one that needs nothing but light.
• Cyclorama (cyc) A large, smooth, pale cloth lit as a coloured sky behind everything else — the simplest way to give a stage depth, and unforgiving of creases.