Physics and budget: why previs is pulling lighting and video together

Asked how much he relied on previsualisation, Shannon Harvey said his entire workflow is built around it. Alongside teaching, he described his professional work as making video games for a living, except that those games are precise simulations of live productions, covering everything from stage automation to lighting and video inside one shared virtual model.

The reason is simple economics. Time in a rehearsal room or a venue is the most expensive time on any production, while time spent in a simulation costs very little. He argued that designers should use the period when they are not yet on site to work out how every element will come together, so the workflow is better before the crew arrives.

He also saw previsualisation as a meeting point. As lighting and video tools converge, the same virtual model becomes the place where different departments test ideas together. Problems that once surfaced late in technical rehearsal can be spotted and argued over on screen, which brings the collaboration process closer and makes the final show feel like one design rather than several.

Shannon Harvey recalled a London conference roughly fifteen years earlier where lighting people discussed controlling media servers and projectors from lighting consoles. A few years later the conversation had flipped, with video people talking about controlling lighting. He saw this swing between departments as a sign that arguing over who controls what misses the more useful question for a design team.

His own answer was to treat everything as surfaces and outputs. A pixel and a lamp are both sources of light, and an LED screen and a projector are both ways of putting light onto a surface. Once a designer understands how those surfaces and sources behave, the line between lighting and video matters much less than the effect on stage.

He passes a blunt rule on to his students. Every project is governed by two things, physics and budget. With enough money, many physical problems can be solved, but no amount of physics will solve a shortage of money. That framing keeps ambition grounded and explains why careful planning, rather than the most expensive kit, so often decides what reaches the stage.

“I tell my students that basically there are two things that are the rules: physics and budget.”

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When the panel turned to generative content, Shannon Harvey disagreed with the idea that it was a niche concern. He argued that computing power had reached the point where video designers no longer needed to render everything in advance, and that this changes the way content is made for live performance, especially on large shows.

He gave the example of a show the previous year using 4K projectors with content around sixteen thousand pixels wide. Instead of rendering long movie files, everything was generated live, and he built the content in less than two weeks. The bigger gain, he said, was being able to make design choices late in the process rather than waiting on a render farm.

He wanted that flexibility to reach lighting too, picturing a lighting desk controlling the time of day or the direction of the sun inside a live 3D scene. That vision shapes how he recruits for his course, looking for fine artists, computer programmers, lighting designers and architects, and expecting each of them to learn what the others need to make better content.