Theatre Lighting

What is theatre lighting used for?

There are multiple types of lighting in theatres available in this category, including some of our high-end range of BeamZ professional lasers, spotlights, fresnel spots and stage blinders. All of these fixtures are ideal for beginning your lighting setup and can also be easily integrated into your pre-existing lighting rig. With DMX programming capabilities, you can set the lights to perform at specific sections of your play to sync up with the scenes.

Stage blinders produce an extremely bright flash of light from their COB-LEDs for various applications. These 2-in-1 fixtures can also be used as a strobe effect in order to produce bumps during the performance, where the sudden, blaring light prevents the audience from seeing scene changes and emulates slow-motion. With the blinders able to be used in a wall or line arrangement that faces the audience, they are most commonly used to encourage applause and allow the actors to see their crowd.

Our range of spotlights varies between moving head, follow and fresnel spots. They are an industry-standard of theatre lighting, where their narrow beam angle highlights a specific object or person to focus the audience’s attention to the point of interest. Follow spots do exactly as stated, where an attendant operator usually moves it manually to focus on the actor.

Moving heads, however, are completely programmable via DMX, allowing 16-bit adjustments to pan and tilt movement in almost every direction for flawless scanning of the stage and room. With motorized focus, they can project gobos onto surfaces for interesting pattern effects that are produced in great detail over long and short distances.

Fresnel spotlights feature a ridged lens that produces a high-intensity beam of light with soft edges and a large throw distance. Some of these fresnel lights are fitted with hinged 'barn doors' that can be adjusted to shape the beam and reduce the glare so that performers won’t be distracted.

Different types of lighting in theatre

Also available in this category are wash lights, which are most commonly used for background lighting or for illuminating the entire space in vibrant colours. Most of these fixtures are used as stage floor lights to light up the backdrop and flat scenery. With a wide and powerful output, they can fill the room with colourful lights to set the atmosphere of the scene. Some even have a hanging bracket to install them on truss to flood the stage with various colours.

Gobo projections are available on various lights, such as moving heads, spots and even lasers. These are designs etched onto rotating discs that can be projected onto surfaces to show different elements, such as foliage and skylines. Some are interchangeable in order to use your own patterns during the play.

Alternatively, you can create your own patterns and texts to display during the performance using ILDA programming on high-end lasers. This is a digital programming software on computers that lets you design different images that will be produced by the laser. This programming option is similar to DMX, but is best suited for single lasers as it has a better signal strength and analog modulation.

DMX is the best option for using multiple lights all at once, as you can program a synchronised display across truss mounted and stage floor lights. Through DMX, you can adjust each light individually for flawless light fades and dimming, strobe and panning movement (for moving head lights). This allows you to programme lights to compliment the atmosphere and action of your stage show, with the ability to create scenery and backdrops to match every scene.