White Light Supplies the Lighting for Baby Reindeer

White Light has supplied the lighting equipment for the critically-acclaimed Baby Reindeer, which has recently opened at The Bush Theatre following its award-winning run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

 

Written by Edinburgh Comedy Award Winner Richard Gadd, Baby Reindeer is a chilling personal narrative that looks at what happens when a kind gesture and trivial interactions results in much wider ramifications. It is directed by Oliver Award-winning Jon Brittain​ and features a lighting design by Peter Small, who comments: “Baby Reindeer is the true story of Richard’s experience of stalking. The thinking for the lighting design was to provide the necessary location changes and anchors that the audience can latch onto; especially as there were no scenery or props to guide them through the multiple revisited locations. Primarily though the lighting was there to follow Richard’s emotional journey down to breaking point and ultimately back up again. The lighting hopefully works in parallel with him on his frenetic journey, which results in a surprisingly dense cue structure and requires razor sharp operating as we pretty much chase his every move”.

 

Prior to its London run, the show began life as part of the Paines Plough Roundabout at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Peter explains: “We wanted to keep some of the DNA of the visuals we had made there as well as wanting to recycle as much of the cue data we had done in Edinburgh as possible, therefore I needed a good quality colour changing LED light with a bright parallel beam that could be clustered together into a formation. The Bush had a good generic stock but I knew I needed to supplement the rig with specific LED lighting”.

 

As a result, Peter contacted WL and worked closely with Account Handler Louise Houlihan to decide on the most suitable fixtures. Peter comments: “We eventually settled on the Chroma Q Color Force 12, which was an unexpectedly good fit, within budget and WL had the quantity we needed available. The decision to use these was quite out of the box but they ended up being a big highlight of the design. Also, you can run them in two cell mode which effectively gives you double the number of lights! We also hired some faithful Narrow 80v TW1s which were great for pulling focus tightly to Gadd for more concentrated moments and making the rest of the picture fall to black”.

 

As the play began in Edinburgh and then received a transfer to London, this meant that the entire creative team had to formulate their design accordingly. He comments: “Perhaps the biggest difficulty in bringing the show to London was transcribing a design made on such a custom lighting rig to traditional lighting equipment in which the fundamental imagery and design logic are the same. The change to the design for London was the addition of the scenery which required lighting in its own right as well as some fiddly 3D drafting to ensure shots could be achieved. The other big addition was seven more projectors which meant stripping back a few looks as video would take the lead visually in those moments. Sometimes, with lighting, less is more and that was definitely the case in this situation”.

 

The show has now opened to five star reviews, almost selling out across its entire run which concludes on November 9th.

 

Peter comments: “It was great to be part of the Baby Reindeer creative team and we’re all delighted by how it’s been received. I’d like to thank WL and my account handler Louise for once again being utterly brilliant and providing the superb service I’ve now come to expect from them”.

 

 

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