Lighting Plans

How to draw a lighting plan – including lighting symbols and the information needed on a plan

Lighting plans are a system of simple images to designate various lanterns.

A lighting plan can be simple or complicated but it is essential a means of communicating the location, type channels and colours to other members working on the performance. I’ve listed 3 aspects here but as earlier noted the plan can be as simple/complicated as you wish and can involve many aspects of the set-up.

Lighting plans can include –

• Address/channel number.
• Colour Gel.
• Lantern Type.
• Position on truss.
• Gobo.
• Direction can be via orientation of symbol or via text eg SR (Stage right), SL (Stage left), Upstage (back of stage), Downstage (front of stage).
• Focus.
• Show name.
• Venue.
• Date.
• Set.
• Location.
• Key – to describe what he symbols mean

We can also produce  a separate sheet if further information is required.

At the moment we are just creating a very basic plan to introduce us the main symbols for the lanterns that we will be using as well as how to denote channels and colours.

Lanterns have specific symbols depending on the type, if we use software then we can get more detail into the plan as most software packages have simple diagrams for many different manufacturers and models. However for our purpose we will be sticking with the 4 main lanterns that we will be using in the box

1. PAR

   

   Parcan Symbols

2. Fresnel

   

   Fresnel Symbol

3. Profile

   

   Profile Symbol

4. Flood

   

   Flood Symbol

   As can be seen some lannterns can have various smbols to denote them.

Other plan conventions

To denote the channel number we use a number surrounded by a circle

Channel Number Symbol

and to denote gels we either just write the number of the gel or the colour we desire.

Gobos we denote by placing a black dot in the necessary lantern symbol and we can also state its name and/or number, this can be seen in the profile image above.