Haze 101 with Lighting Designer Cory Pattak

Ryan McCartan as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby (Photo credit Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)

Lighting designer Cory Pattak is a busy man, not content with designing the lighting for some of Broadway’s most beautiful shows, he is also host of in 1: the podcast, a podcast dedicated to sharing the work of theatre designers. His website and socials are full of colorful pictures of his most recent theatrical designs, classics like ‘A Wonderful World’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’.

Haze is something that Cory relies on throughout all his designs. As he explains, it brings his designs to life in a way that it impossible without atmospherics.

“There are many reasons to use haze onstage, but for me, the number one reason is to create energy,” he expands. “As the lighting states change, whether its brighter, dimmer, more color or moving around the stage, we create a form of kinetic energy. Without haze, these changes are only seen when the light hits a surface. Not every seat in the house is going to have a great view of the floor, especially in the orchestra or stalls levels and so huge areas of the audience will lose that entire surface and miss the effect.”

In order to emphasize a big lighting moment, such as a musical button, underscoring a dramatic moment, or an emotional swell, the lighting change needs to register with as many audience members as possible. By adding haze into the air, designers are adding millions of tiny droplets for the light to hit, revealing the changes without needing a surface.

“Adding haze heightens the impact of lighting and makes it a much more present design element. Everything feels bigger and grander,” he recalls. “We can also use haze to help tell the environmental story too, visually representing the temperature and geography of the location. We can even use it to hide action on stage, or create ‘air architecture’ helping to fill the vertical space of a stage with designed elements, so that it doesn’t feel like a void.”

For Pattak, haze is a design element that can make or break a lighting design, without it he feels like the design is missing a major component, so working with his team to get haze just right is a large part of the work they do.

“Ask anyone on my team and they will tell you that there are few things that drive me crazier than applying haze badly!” he continues. “Nearly all of my shows are designed to use haze and without it cues don’t feel like they register impactfully. The stage can feel anemic, its less exciting, like it’s not firing on all cylinders. Once the opening of a show was ruined by a non-functioning hazer, it had a huge impact on me, I just wanted to crawl away and hide. Haze isn’t just icing, it’s an integral element of the lighting design and without it, many cues will not look correct.”

Getting haze to perfectly hang on stage can seem like a never-ending task, destined to always be slightly out of a designer’s grasp, in drafty theatres, with many moving parts and huge numbers of cast, crew and audience members adding to the possible variables night after night, means that applying a formula, or following a strict recipe is never going to deliver successful results. Pattak has years of experience and a range of techniques ready to deploy in order to wrangle the haze to get exactly the results he requires.

“It can sometimes feel like we’re chasing our tails,” Pattak concludes. “Often, we will get our haze levels exactly right during rehearsals, only to add hundreds of bodies to the theatre, in the form of the audience, which changes the temperature and drafts, so all of the atmosphere will need to be re-dialed. It can vary wildly from one night to the next, so we just keep tweaking until opening night, then we ensure that the board operator, who stays with the show, has a fader, so then they can make adjustments during the performance.”

Find out more about Cory Pattak’s methods via his website and socials. His Instagram feed is a riot of color and illustrates his haze techniques perfectly.

https://www.instagram.com/corypattak
https://www.corypattak.com
https://in1podcast.com