Resources for learning Lighting Design, Show Control, and Animatronics

Here are some books and online posts that we have found to be very good for learning the types of things VenueMagic^® excels at:

If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling – Patti Bellantoni

While not specifically about lighting design.  This book helps you understand color and how it impacts the emotions.  Many of our customers are not professional lighting designers and this book can help you learn how the use of color in your performance or design can help portray the emotion you want to communicate.

Based on her research in film and the effects of color on behavior, Bellantoni sets out to discuss over 60 files and their influence of the six major colors which trigger specific emotional states. Each color section lists tips for using or avoiding a specific color on one page.

 

 

 

Concert Lighting: Techniques, Art and Business – James Moody, Paul Dexter

This was one of the first books I read when getting back into lighting design after finding VenueMagic.  It is well written, covers all aspects of Concert Lighting including being a roady. While it doesn’t discuss lighting in terms of how easy VenueMagic makes things, it does give you some background when you try to figure out why lights have so many different settings and how the rest of the world deals with lighting.

From Amazon’s Description: “Concert Lighting is a comprehensive book on lighting design for concerts. Placing special emphasis on rock-and-roll concert lighting equipment and techniques, the book takes its reader on tour, covering every aspect of that experience for the touring professional lighting technician and designer. It also provides several chapters to cross-media use of concert lighting techniques. Discussions of applications in film, video, the theatre, and the corporate world demonstrate the ways in which today’s lighting designers cross over into other design areas.

Covering computer-aided drafting, moving lights, hi-bred consoles, concert techniques in television production, and featuring designs by some of the top concert designers in the industry, Concert Lighting is designed to assist students and professionals in understanding the unique fixtures, structures, special effects and design elements used in concert lighting today.”