Gobo Studios · a DBA of Monterey Skates LLC · Monterey, CA · (831) 264-8797 · gobostudios.com
Lighting design
Before the first song lands, before anyone has said a word into a microphone, the room has already told everybody what kind of night this is. That is the lighting doing it.
This is the part of the job we are named after, and it is the part we build software for.
The approach
A gear list is not a design. Plenty of vendors will quote you a count of moving heads without having seen the room, and you end up paying for fixtures pointed at a wall nobody looks at.
So the order is: walk the room, then decide what goes in it.
Where do people enter, and what do they see in the first three seconds. Where is the stage, the court, the cake, the photo backdrop. Which wall is the one every phone camera will point at all night. What is the ceiling made of and can anything hang from it. What does the room look like with the house lights at half, because that is what you are actually designing against.
Then the fixtures. A cafeteria with a low white ceiling needs a completely different rig than a gym with exposed beams forty feet up, and the same quote for both is a sign nobody measured anything.
The rig
Different fixtures do different jobs. Naming them is more useful than calling the whole thing a light show.
LED pars set on the floor against the walls, throwing colour up the vertical surfaces. This is the one that changes the photographs. A beige cafeteria wall in school colours stops reading as a cafeteria. Set to one colour for the night, or programmed to move with the show. Count is set by the room and the perimeter, not by a package tier.
The booth itself is a fixture: three moving heads and twelve PARs built into it, so even the smallest booking gets beams over the floor rather than a light on a stick. No extra stands, no extra cables across the walkway.
Motorised fixtures that pan and tilt live. Ours are ZQ02341 150-watt heads plus smaller ZQ02006 heads. These are what make a room feel like a concert instead of a party. Every head has per-fixture pan and tilt limits set at load-in, so a beam physically cannot sweep into a doorway, a fire exit sign, or somebody’s eyes.
Segmented LED bars that light a stage, a backdrop, or a head table in even colour. Quiet fixtures. They are what makes the court presentation look intentional instead of lit by whatever was already on.
A gobo is a cut disc placed in front of a light so the beam projects a shape. Break-up patterns across a floor or ceiling, or a specific image on a wall: a class year, a monogram, a school or company logo. It is where the company name comes from.
Worth knowing before you look at anybody’s photos. A beam of light is invisible in clean air. What you see in every concert shot is the beam hitting particles. No haze, no beams, no matter how many moving heads are in the room.
Which means haze is a conversation with your venue, not a surprise on the night. Fog and haze set off smoke detectors, and a gym full of students is the worst possible place to find that out. Some venues allow water-based haze with the detectors on a temporary bypass arranged through facilities. Some allow none at all.
We will ask. If the answer is no, the design changes: more colour on surfaces, more movement across walls and floor, less reliance on mid-air beams. A no-haze room can still look excellent. It just cannot look like a concert photo, and anybody promising you otherwise has not asked your facilities manager.
Haze is included in the package either way. It only comes out where your facilities manager clears it in writing, and in a lot of gyms the answer is no. The price is the same whichever way that goes.
The difference
Most mobile lighting runs in auto mode. A little microphone inside the fixture listens to the room, guesses at a tempo, and flashes near the beat. It drifts, it triggers off a shout or a door slamming, and after twenty minutes everybody in the room has stopped seeing it.
Our rig is driven by SceneRig, software we wrote. It reads the music from VirtualDJ directly: tempo, beat position, first-beat offset, and per-deck audio levels, twenty times a second over a local REST connection. Between those readings it interpolates every frame, so movement is smooth at sixty frames a second instead of stepping. A phase-locked loop watches the audio peaks and corrects the beat position continuously, so when the tempo gets nudged mid-track the lights stay locked instead of walking away from the beat.
The result is unglamorous to describe and obvious in a room. The rig changes on the downbeat. Not near it.
Output is real DMX over a DMX King UltraDMX MAX interface, five hundred and twelve channels, the same protocol a theatre uses. Nothing here is a sound-to-light gimmick.
Thirteen DMX colour patterns and fifteen moving-head motions, chosen from and combined per song. A slow song gets a cool wash that breathes across a bar. A peak-time track gets heads snapping to a new position on every beat.
Scene rules read what is loaded in VirtualDJ and pick the look automatically, so the operator is watching the floor instead of hunting for a preset.
When we are running visuals, the fixtures pull their colours from what is on screen. The room matches the wall instead of contradicting it.
The strobe channel is suppressed below fifty percent audio energy and ramps in above it, so a quiet moment never gets an unexpected strobe hit.
If you have a student or a guest with photosensitive epilepsy, say so at booking and the strobe channel is disabled for the whole night. Not turned down. Off.
Pan and tilt limits are set per fixture at load-in, so heads cannot point into an exit sign, a doorway, or the front row.
SceneRig has a stage visualiser that renders every patched fixture in its live output colour, so looks get built and checked before the rig is in the truck.
| We need | Why | Typical |
|---|---|---|
| Two dedicated 20-amp circuits | Lighting and audio on separate circuits so a lighting inrush never drops the PA | Within 50 feet of the DJ position |
| Load-in access | Cases roll. Stairs double the time. | A door we can back a vehicle to, or a lift |
| Load-in window | Full rig up and tested before guests | 3 hours before doors |
| Load-out window | After your hard stop, not during | 90 minutes |
| Floor space at the walls | Uplights sit on the floor against vertical surfaces | A 12-inch strip clear of chairs |
| A decision on haze | Detectors, bypass, or none | Answered in writing before the event |
| Ceiling info | Whether anything can be hung, or whether everything goes on stands | Height and structure |
If the answer to any of these is no, say so early. Every one of them has a workaround, and all the workarounds are cheap in the planning call and expensive at 4pm on the day.
Scale
Lighting is included in every DJ package, sized to your crowd and your room. These are the three shapes that sizing usually takes. Indicative, not a quote — the real answer comes from the room, and pricing is on the packages page.
Up to about 150. Low ceiling, hard walls, tables around the edge.
Uplighting on the perimeter, one effect bar over the floor, wash on the stage or head table.
150 to 500. High ceiling, long throws, a real dance floor.
Full uplighting, effect bar, moving heads on stands, wash bars on the stage, gobo projection on the feature wall.
No walls to light, power is the constraint.
Everything on stands, wash and moving heads only, uplighting only where there is structure to light.
Next step
Photos and a floor plan are enough to start. You get a design and a written quote back, not a list of fixture names.
Or call. (831) 264-8797.