Andris Kasparovics
Creative Director, Lighting Designer
www.sightunseenstudios.com
Cultivating a natural interest in light from a young age, Andris Kasparovics’s lifelong passion for the medium and curious nature are foundations that have helped shape this creative designer’s successful career. Artist, experimenter, collaborator, he seeks the uncharted territory in order to create something new. And who knows what surprises await at one of his dinner parties!
Meet Andris 
These are extraordinary times and people are coping in different ways. What have you been doing to stay sane/positive through this?
This last year has been tough, it’s unsettling not knowing when life and work will return to any semblance of ‘normal’. Time is one thing we now have a lot more of for being attentive to loved ones and colleagues, building on our skillsets, supporting others, and experimenting with new ideas. It’s important for us to keep our heads above water and spirits in check and to take advantage of the opportunity of time.
And what have you used your time on?
I’ve been experimenting at home with some ideas that I’ve been meaning to work on forever. A wall in our home has been blank for too long and is now the perfect canvas for me to utilize right now. I’m designing a piece with a solar tracking to guide a beam of sunlight continually throughout the day into a box of slowly shifting prisms and dichroic filters. What comes out is a kind of lumia; beautiful, evolving, abstract patterns created by the sun. I’m attracted to making artwork that uses physics and nature with the support of technology. I’d love for this eventually to be on a gallery wall as well as in our home!
How has your work been affected and are you working on any projects at the moment?
Back in January 2020 I was prepping for a product launch that would tour to Singapore, Barcelona, Sydney, and Vegas. Right after I sent out the last paperwork revision, Singapore cancelled. OK, I said, one out of four I can deal with. Barcelona dropped off two weeks later, and Sydney went away three days after that. Luckily we still had Vegas… until I landed on load-in day and checked into the hotel. Not ten minutes later I got a text from the production manager telling me he just got a call that the show for 3000 attendees was now cancelled! Just like that, the entire live event industry disappeared for us all. It’s devastating, I feel for everyone including our crews, vendors, venues, clients, production companies, and loved ones. For my company, we had some savings from projects in January and February and I feel lucky for that. I’ve shifted focus to architectural clients, a museum project, and TV work is picking up again.
What was your youth like and what did you want to be when you grew up?
It was pretty clear I had a natural interest in lights and electricity from a very young age as my mom loves to recall. She tells me about going to the circus when I was three, I kept looking at all the gear instead of the elephants and acrobats inside the ring. Visiting friends of my parents around the same age I would allegedly go around unplugging everything and later get panicked calls from them after we got home asking why nothing was working!
My Grandfather, Sigismunds Vidbergs, was a well known artist from Latvia. My mother inherited his creative energy and was nurturing to my sisters and my interests, mine often involving taking apart gadgets. I’m thankful for my family for being so supportive and allowing me to explore the things that interested me at such a young age even if it seemed odd at the time.
You grew up in New York but now live in Los Angeles. Why the move west?
I grew up in New York and graduated from the Theatre Conservatory at Purchase College with a BFA in Lighting Design. After school, I stayed in NY and used my connections from college to work in theatre in Manhattan. An opportunity arose to work on live TV shows for BET. It felt like a natural progression from theatre and the pace of live broadcast was exciting to me. I stayed for a few years before becoming the Lighting Director for Inside the Actor’s Studio for three seasons and designing lighting for live concerts and events in town. A friend moved to SF to take advantage of the post-dotcom arts scene in a city that was reinventing itself culturally, I was inspired as well so I made the leap and headed West. At the time RGB LED lighting was pretty new, it offered a whole new set of tools that opened up opportunities for me in SF as a designer for corporate theatre, architectural lighting, and art installations. In 2018 I moved to Los Angeles with my other half, we live in the canyons surrounded by nature and plenty of hiking trails where I often go to do some creative thinking . One of the inspiring things here is the quality of sunlight, it inspires me to get outdoors as well as use the naturally sunny days for my artwork. LA is similar to NY being a major entertainment hub which lets me get back to my roots in TV production and I really enjoy that.
Do you remember when you first became enamored with lighting?
One very vivid memory was visiting the Fort Lee NJ visitor center with my grandparents when I was six years old. I remember seeing a huge topographic map that lit up in different areas while a voice told the history of early naval battles in each area of the map. Eventually I was bored, started poking around, and found a secret door under the model. Inside was a total wonderland of lights, motors, gears, and spinning color wheels that I discovered were running the lights above! It left such a strong impression on me and one day it clicked for me that technology manipulating light can tell a story.
My first lighting ‘design’ was in 5th grade where I taped a bunch of toggle switches together inside of a shoebox that powered clip lights that I strung up around the stage in the auditorium. My friend did a lip sync for a talent show and I was offstage busking away to the music, flipping the switches. It’s crazy to think that 20 years later I would go on to command hundreds of lights and have my own programmer with a proper console. I believe it’s those things that we are drawn to very early on that catalyze our imaginations and lead us to discover and hone our talent.
Is there a type/style of lighting you seek to create with each design or does that change with every project?
In general, I’m drawn to using color in broad strokes and tend to favor high contrast looks. References I tend to keep going back to are chiaroscuro paintings. They use strong, directional light sources in an otherwise darkened scene. Live shows allow for more latitude with this than on camera. The contrast in conjunction with space helps connect the performer to the audience in a more intimate way. The camera is more limited in how much contrast ratio gets recorded because of the compressed dynamic range vs. the naked eye. You have to think differently for each medium to get the most amount of visual expression out of it.
I like to employ unconventional light sources where I can. A few years back I lit a dance performance using video projectors in the wings as low sidelight with the dancers in all white. The way the textures in the video morphed over the costumes as the dancers moved across stage was stunning. Another was a site-specific play on the roof of a high school in lower Manhattan. I found a mercury vapor floodlight sitting on the roof during the site survey and was inspired to use it as a main source for one of the acts. Turned out it had this amazing warm up cycle where it started out as this murky greenish color and gradually shifted to a bright crisp blue-white over five minutes, the transition was beautiful and you only needed one cue! I love tungsten sources and how they create a multisensory experience. You can see the light and feel the heat coming from it. The simplicity of raw electrons heating bare metal to incandescence, the thermal inertia of the filament, and the beautiful color temperature shift are all aspects I admire.
When you initially sit down to design lighting, what is the first thing you think about or the first step you take?
After speaking with the client and reading the script or treatment, I write down my initial thoughts and impressions. This gives me a feeling of what the tone should be and starts to spark ideas for imagery. It’s a jumping off point but also ends up being the foundation that I work from. I consider story arcs and what the audience should feel as well as the atmosphere and how to emphasize it, then start doing photo research. Putting together a mood board is an important communication tool with the client since expressing lighting concepts are often difficult to put into words. Pulling images as references from fine art photographs, paintings, or even images I’ve collected from travels can help show examples of color, movement, intensity, form and composition for designing a project.
You have an impressive list of design successes to your credit. From design day one to the end of a project, what is your favorite part of the process?
Collaboration is my favorite part of the process; it’s invigorating to work with other creative minds. Sometimes the best ideas come from a lot of minds with different points of view, coming together to solve a single problem. Someone might say ‘What if we do this?’ and that could spark ideas that weren’t initially apparent, collectively leading to a more exciting solution. When everyone shares ideas and is in tune with each other even the smallest observation could be the very piece that solves the whole puzzle.
You used Elation’s Dartz 360 and Artiste Van Gogh luminaires on the “Pat McGann: When’s Mom Gonna Be Home?” comedy special. How did the choice of fixtures come about?
For Pat’s show, I wanted a moving head wash fixture with beam shaping ability to keylight the stage from a tricky FOH positon. This would be difficult to manually focus with conventional fixtures. Elation invited me to demo the Van Gogh before it was first released. I realized it could be a great solution for the show. It has a high CRI LED engine with a great flat field and in the demo the photometrics had tested very well. We rented six of them and the intensity levels were within a ¼ stop across the stage making it easy to dial in. They worked great and were the perfect solution for the show.
The Dartz are made for TV in my opinion, they really look good on camera and I can design a lot of them into the set without big fixture footprints getting in the way visually. The tiny size, speed, output, and consistent beam quality across fixtures worked perfectly as an aerial background element as well as a fun eye-candy look for the opening.
Have you used Elation much in your career?
I’ve specified Elation more in recent years than I have in the past. They do their homework and have features and fixture types that are lacking amongst other manufacturers. I had a lot of fun pixel mapping with Cuepix when they came out, they are nice and punchy with those large cells. I especially appreciate the recent IP-rated fixtures for outdoor installation projects- game changers in my opinion. I’ve always disliked the aesthetics of environmental enclosures so having a fixture like the Proteus Maximus is an easy choice when dealing with water or unpredictable weather outside (or inside!).
What do you see as a hot trend in lighting?
It’s nice to see increased color gamut in LED fixtures with additional wavelength emitters. Back when we only had RGB to mix colors anything lit with LED had a very artificial appearance and the whites were missing a lot of component colors. Now tungsten-based hues are much more realistic and rendering skin tones has also improved a lot. I’m a big fan of linear LED fixtures like the Elation Chorus Line; it’s a useful tool that allows you to define space using straight parallel lines instead of round beams. I’ve loved that look ever since I first saw the old Light Curtains on Broadway back in the 80’s.
You’ve designed lighting in a number of different areas from television and live and corporate events to experiential branding and lighting installations. What is your favorite segment to design in?
Using light as a medium for artistic expression is my favorite thing to do now. I was commissioned in 2019 to do an installation for a non-profit organization working to rehabilitate water wells in developing countries for their big fundraiser gala. The goal was to create a way to visually symbolize the 1000 water wells that they were working on, and the impact donations would make on them coming back online. I designed an 80-foot diameter sculpture in the shape of a ring with 1000 individually dimmable incandescent bulbs that were hung in a wave pattern. This piece was over the audience and we used it as an interactive installation to serve two purposes; as donors made contributions the bulbs above them lit up as acknowledgement of their generosity. The other was programming subtle water reflection patterns that played throughout the night to create a beautiful ambience overhead.
Is there something you’d like to accomplish in this industry that you haven’t already?
Virtual Production using XR technology is a very interesting space right now. Unreal Engine has become the dominant tool in creating fully rendered 3D environments where you can insert and control lighting all in real time. The creative potential is wide open for exploration, especially now that you can control many elements inside the engine via DMX directly. In Unreal things can be done with lighting that would be impossible to achieve in the real world so that is something I am doing a deep dive into at the moment.
What do you like to do when you’re not doing lighting?
I was originally planning on studying fine art photography before going into lighting design so it is nice to have a means of self expression that I can take with me on the go. I like to carry my DSLR and macro lens to discover and photograph abstract imagery found in natural and urban settings as I travel. I like exploring textures and finding details in places often overlooked, beautiful things can be found in everyday places if you stop to consider them in a new light.
What’s something about Andris Kasparovics that people might find surprising?
Come to one of my dinner parties and you’ll find out!!
