Week ONE ... The Moon at Play

I walked out of a rehearsal last Monday night and happened to glance up at the sky ... boy was I glad I did. I was fortunate to witness this amazing play of the moon and clouds. It was mesmerizing. The clouds created asymmetrical pockets that the moon's light could peer through and formed a canvas for the intense colorful and visual display to bounce off of. I was intrigued by how many colors I could identify and how the color saturation was so rich from so far away. Deep yellows and oranges surrounded the moon's white ring, with hints of pink and red. In the top photo, the dense black pocket below/to the left of the moon was reflecting no light at all next to such a brilliant light source and this intrigued me; its outline not entirely razor sharp, but its shape extremely definable. In the bottom photo, I embraced both the symmetry of the colorful ring and the way it washed through the dark areas with just a hint of color.

The most obvious choice for representation of the fragmented clouds would be through the use of gobos in the pipe ends; bringing the texture of the sky down to the stage and illuminating the pockets. I would use an isolated special/down pool with a soft beamed Fresnel fixture on either the down backs or high sides, or maybe the pipe ends to create a more angular response and allow the light to spill further onto the stage. Adding the color to create warmth (without muddling the brilliant white representing the moonlight) might be a job for a Leko fixture coming also from the high sides, but dialed down to approximately 60%, though I feel this may still affect the look of the center of the white down pool and not be exclusively seen at the outer ring. Possibly a soft blue wash in the shins could represent the coldness of space against the warmth of the light.

"When you wish upon a star ...... " ;)