Uplighting

Uplighting is a row of compact fixtures placed around the perimeter of a room, each throwing a cone of coloured light up the wall behind it. It is the effect most people picture when they hear event lighting, and it is doing something specific: lifting colour off the floor and on to the largest surfaces in the room, which are the walls.

It works because a hotel ballroom is designed to be neutral. Beige walls, patterned carpet, a ceiling of downlights. Colour on the walls replaces that neutrality without touching anything, and it photographs — the wide shots of a gala are mostly wall.

The thing that separates a good wash from a patchy one is spacing and distance from the wall. Too far apart and the room reads as a line of bright blobs with dark gaps between them; too close to the wall and each fixture produces a narrow spike rather than a broad wash. The fixture’s beam angle decides both, and the spacing is worked out from the room dimensions rather than by eye.

The practical decision is battery or cable. Battery fixtures go anywhere and leave no cable to tape, and they have a run time that has to cover the whole evening rather than the programme. Cabled fixtures run all night and bring a cable path with them, which in a room with doors on four sides is a real constraint.

Event lighting — owned inventory, our own crew, and a site survey before anything is specified.

• Stage wash The even, flattering light a person stands in to be seen — the least glamorous part of a lighting plot and the first thing a camera exposes as missing.
• Gobo A cut or etched template dropped into a fixture so it projects a shape — texture, a window, a pattern on a floor, or a logo — and sized by what fits the gate, not by the picture.
• Lighting console The desk that holds the patch, the looks and the running order — and the reason a show can be rebuilt in ten minutes when a speaker is moved up the programme.