FIND OUT WHY UPLIGHTING IS THE #1 TYPE OF LIGHTING YOU NEED FOR YOUR WEDDING!

This episode is all about up lighting.  Uplighting is a type of wedding lighting that adds a glow of color to the room. It really creates the ambience and set the mood! Whether you're a couple or a wedding professional this episode is going to cover everything you need to know about uplighting. We'll talk about things like what is uplighting and how to use it and where to put it in your venue. By the end of this episode you will be an up lighting expert! So let's jump right in and talk about 10 things that you need to know about uplighting.

WHAT IS UPLIGHTING?

So first things first, what's up lighting? Uplighting is a type of wedding lighting that makes your room glow in color. It's really magical and just so amazing when you see those walls light up from floor to ceiling! It's kind of hard to really do it justice with words. It's just one of those things that you have to experience yourself to really appreciate it, but I can tell you I have worked with couples for almost a decade now and they always say the same thing, you know, they start out thinking about up lighting before the wedding and they end up getting it because it's on the checklist and everyone tells them they need it but I can tell that they're not totally convinced that you really need uplighting - but they do it anyway. After the wedding thing, you won't believe calls in the emails that we get and people are just beside themselves. They couldn't believe how good the room looked with uplighting! So in my experience everyone across the board is always saying that you've got to have up lighting and it's really going to give you the biggest bang-for-your-buck when it comes to wedding decor. It really does so much to enhance the event.

HOW TO SETUP UPLIGHTING

So let's talk about how to set up up lighting. It probably sounds pretty intimidating to think about setting up uplighting but it's actually really easy. So the way it works, is that you'll turn on the lights, you'll pick a color and then set it on the floor right up against the wall. Then you tilt the light just a little bit until you see that light start traveling up the wall and you've got it. So it's really really easy and it probably just takes about a minute or so to set up each light.

WHAT DOES AN UPLIGH LOOK LIKE?

Okay. So next what does an uplight look like 7-Up light is actually a pretty small light you'd be surprised because it lights up whole venue, but the lights themselves are actually only about 6 inches wide in about 3 in thick. It's kind of like an oversized hockey puck

WHAT ARE THE TYPES OF UPLIGHTS?

Let's talk about what are the types of uplights. There are really two types of up lights that you can get – there’s standard up lights and wireless uplights. Now, they look pretty much the same and they do the same thing the only real difference is that a standard up lights use power cords and the wireless uplights have built-in batteries. When it comes to choosing which type of up lighting is right for you, it really just boils down to 3 considerations: the price, your venue, and the convenience factor.

So first when it comes to price: standard up lights are going to be the cheapest and the wireless uplights will be a little more expensive. And that's mainly because with those Wireless uplights they have a built-in battery and that makes them heavier for shipping and delivery. So a little bit of a price point difference there. And the second reason you might want to choose one over the other is based on your venue. So the standard up lights need outlets, which means you've got to have a few outlets available in your venue if you're doing an outdoor wedding or a tent or maybe you just don't have access to a lot of outlets. You may need to go with the wireless uplighting so that you don't need to worry about power cords. Now the great thing to keep in mind is that with the standard up lights. You don't need an outlet for every light you can actually link them together up to 40 up lights can be linked together using a single outlet. So the way that works is that you plug one light into the outlet and then the second light gets plugged into the first light and you just keep going with all your lights. The third reason to choose one over the other is the convenience factor. So, of course when you're connecting lights together and using the power cords, it's going to take a little bit more time. If you've got the wireless uplights, there are no cords. So you just hit the on button and they're ready to go. The other thing is what the standard up lights you'll use a button on each light program the color and for the wireless uplights they come with a remote control where you can push a color-coded button to set your color. So overall it's going to take a little bit more time to set up a standard uplight. And it'll be a little bit quicker with the wireless uplights. Now either way. Both options are really easy to set up and it goes really quick. So it's more so just the consideration of what your budget allows and how much it matters to you to save a little bit of time. So that's the difference between standard and wireless uplights.

HOW TO SETUP UPLIGHTS – WIRELESS VS STANDARD

Now the setup steps are a little bit different if you're doing the standard or the wireless uplights. So when it comes to the colors, you can program on the stand up lights using a button right on the light. What you'll do is hit the up or down arrow on the up light and it's going to start scrolling through all the different colors when you see the color that you like you just hit enter and then it stays on that color. If you're using the wireless uplights, you'll use the remote control and just pointed at the lights and then push a button for whichever color that you want. Now course when it comes to powering on the light with the standard you're going to be plugging it in, and with the wireless uplight you'll hit the power button. Now quick tip to throw in there. If you're using the wireless uplights, you might want to be thinking about how to conserve that battery power if you're setting up ahead of time. So if you're getting into the venues day the day before what you can do is set up all the lights where you want them. Make sure you power them on so that you can get the lights just right and then on the remote control, there's a blackout button. Do you hit that button and all the lights will go off the batteries are power down and you just leave them like that until it's time for the wedding to start. So right before the wedding just grab that remote and hit the blackout button again and all the lights will come on and that battery is going to last for about 8 to 10 hours depending on which color that you're using now if you do need to charge up your place, but say you test them out a few days ahead of time and you need to charge them back up. You would just use power cords to charge the lights. So you plug the lights into an outlet and leave them plugged in and they'll charge up you can link all the lights together to a single outlet to make it easy for charging and when you see all four bars light up on the back of the uplight, you know, it's fully charged.

WHERE TO USE UPLIGHTING IN YOUR VENUE?

Another big question that people always want to know about uplighting is where to use it in the venue. So there are a lot of different ways that you can use up lighting. The most popular is to use up Lighting on the walls around the entire venue. You can also use up Lighting on backdrops in your tent on trees or even for tables. So I'll explain those a little bit more. When it comes to uplighting on the walls. There's a few different looks that you can do you can put up Lighting on all of the walls around the entire venue and that's going to really give you that dramatic look - and in the lighting industry, we call it a color wash. So you are washing the walls in color. Another thing you can do is just pick a certain area of the wall to highlight with uplighting so you might want to choose your sweetheart table or just the cake table and put the uplighting there and that's when it create a focal point and really highlight that particular area another great way to use uplighting is on a backdrop so you can actually use the lights with your linen backdrops and it's going to make the material Glow In Color. It looks really beautiful as far as set up you can actually put the up lights in front of the backdrop or behind it. If you put the lights in front of the backdrop, it's going to be brighter and more dramatic and if you put the lights behind the backdrop, it'll be a little bit softer another place you can use up lighting is with an outdoor tent. So this is a great way to dress up that white and you can add splashes of color. The cool thing is that the beams of light will actually kind of been with the tent. So it'll go up the wall and then it occurred around up onto the ceiling of the tent. So you can do some really fun looks with uplighting. You can also use up lighting for outdoor spaces like trees. You just put the up light at the base of the tree and it's going to light up the tree in any color. Another look you can do is called the table glow effect. So it makes it look like your table linens are glowing! You can do this with cocktail tables for the head table. All you need to do is just put enough light underneath the table and kind of angle it until it catches on to the linens. You'll see those linens just light up in color. So you're doing the cocktail tables. You probably just need one uplight. And if it's the sweetheart table ideas two or three uplights depending how big it is probably space them about three feet apart to give a really dramatic glow effect to that table. So those are just some of the places that you can use up lighting and honestly you can get creative and put it anywhere as long as you've got a solid surface you can use.

HOW MANY UPLIGHTS DO YOU NEED? TIPS ON HOW TO ESTIMATE QUANTITY!

Okay, so we just breezed through five different things that you need to know about uplighting. So we're more than halfway done here. The next thing we'll talk about is how to estimate quantity. This is so important to know even if you're hiring a lighting professional to do the lighting. I think it's good to understand what it's going to look like with different quantities of lighting and be able to make a good decision about how much lighting that you're going to do. So when it comes to estimating the quantity of uplights, it's actually really simple the general rule of thumb is to place the up lights 10 feet apart for a nice A Relic or five feet apart for a dramatic look so the first step to calculating the quantity of up lights for your Venue is to get the floor plan. So if you ask the venue, they should have a floor plan that they can give you and if not, you can always just take a tape measure and measure the walls yourself. So what you want to do is measure the length of each wall that you can use for uplighting. So for the most part you're just measuring the entire venue, but you don't want to include things like doorways or Windows or places where you just won't be able to put any lights. Like maybe there's a built-in bar area. So measure all the usable wall space and Skip everywhere that you can't put up lights. Then what you'll do is just take those measurements and add them together. So if you had four walls and each one was 25 ft long, that means you have a total of 100 ft then you're going to divide that by either 5 or 10 depending on which look that you want to do. So remember the rule of thumb five feet apart is your dramatic look and 10 feet apart is your nice overall look, so if you've got that hundred feet of wall that you need to cover if you're doing your standard look you're going to divide that by 10. And 100 / 10 equals 10, so that means you need 10 up lights for that room. Now if you wanted to go for the dramatic look you're going to take that 100 feet of wall space / 5 and that means you need 20 uplights for that room. So just measure walls and divide that number by 5 or 10 and you've got the quantity of up lights that you need. Now, if you hate math, don't worry. I've got a little secret for you over on our website at rentmywedding.com. We actually have an uploading calculator. So that makes it super easy. You don't have to do any of the work you just put in your number and it's going to tell you exactly how many up lights that you need for your room and you can tell the calculator either at the overall square footage like a 5000 square foot venue or you could put in those actual measurements of your room like a hundred feet of wall, or if you don't know any of those details, you can even just put in how many people in the room holds and that calculator is going to tell you how many up lights do you need for the typical venue that holds that many people so super easy check out that up lighting calculator and you can estimate exactly how many uplights that you need for your venue.

WHAT COLORS CAN YOU GET FOR UPLIGHTING?

Okay. So now let's switch gears a little bit and talk about color. What colors can you do with uplighting you can actually set the up lights to pretty much any shade of any color. They're so customizable now it when it comes to color there are some standard colors that are pretty set on the up lights. So when we talked about set up and mentioned you push a button and it's going to scroll through all the colors on the standard up lights or on the remote control. You'll hit a button for the color that you want. So pretty much most of the colors that you want or going to be there in those presets. But if you've got a really unique color, like maybe you have just a very light shade of teal and that's not on the remote control. Well, you can actually still program that light to your exact color. You can color match to any color that you're using for your wedding. So the way you do that is using the advanced programming buttons on the up lights and it lets you either punch in a custom color code or you can mix the colors yourself. The easiest way is to put in a color code. If you're doing rentals through rentmywedding for example, we actually give you a color chart that has hundreds of colors and the color code to put in for that certain color. So that's the easy way if you don't have a color chart or if you just want to get something really customized you're feeling creative. You can go ahead and mix those colors yourself. It's kind of like mixing paints. So if you think back, you know, you mix a little red and a little blue purple and if you add some green it changes the color. Well the same thing works with the uplighting. It's got red green and blue and you can adjust the percentage of each of those colors. You will see the light change in real time to the color that you're mixing. So you increase the red or decrease the red and keep playing around until you get exactly the color that you want. So just to recap colors can be done using the preset buttons on the lights or the remotes or you can enter color code or you can be an artist and mix your own custom color.

WHAT COLORS LOOK BEST FOR UPLIGHTING?

Now another question that we get a lot is asking for advice about what color looks best with uplighting. So the good news is that all of the colors look amazing. So it's really just a matter of personal preference but to give you kind of a road map for how to pick your color. There's two ways. You can go about it first you can think about what are the colors for your wedding palette and you can also think about what mood that you're trying to create. So the first thing looking at the tellers for your wedding no, let's say that you have blue and gold as your wedding colors, you could actually use either one.  For the uplighting both look really beautiful. It really just comes down to whether there's a certain color that you want to be more predominant in your wedding decor. And if you want it to look more dramatic or more subtle, so certain colors are just going to look more dramatic. They can be energy and excitement while other colors are going to be a little softer and subdued and be more like accent lighting. So the colors that are really dark or vibrant life blues and purples and reds. Those are going to be the high energy colors. Do you want something a little bit softer? I recommend going with shades of Amber or white or pale shades of any color. So your light pinks and your Light blues. Those are all going to give a real software. Most people just pick one color are all of the up Lighting in the venue, but you can also mix it up a little bit. So if you've got multiple rooms in the venue, you can do each room in a different color and you could also use two colors for the same room. Maybe you do the walls in gold and then you could put a blue up light in each corner to just add that extra splash of color.

ADVANCED PROGRAMMING AND UPLIGHTING TIPS

Alright, so we've covered a lot of the basics about uplighting. Let's talk just for a minute about some of the advanced programming that you can do. For most people you'll just want to use the uplight and its default setting you'll turn it on and leave it on one color for the entire wedding. But if you do want to get a little technical or you want to try something different there's a lot more that you can do with the up lights. So some of the most popular functions are to do color change it you can set the up lights to color change through all different colors and you can actually control whether it fades between the different colors or it snaps between the colors or even and you can make it slow or fast and it's a really nice way to do something different or maybe add more energy to the room. You can also set those colors to change to the beat of the music which is another really fun way that you can do with the uplighting. Now, I won't get into too much more of the technical stuff because I think for most people if you're doing a wedding, do you want to just stick with either that single color or the color change mode.

WHERE TO GET UPLIGHTING?

Okay. So we are almost done. The last thing I talk about is where to get up lighting. You can either rent uplighting or hire a lighting company who can come and set it all up for you. If you're just looking to save some money you can actually rent uplighting and set it up yourself. So by using a do-it-yourself uplighting rentals, you can create the same amazing luck, but for a fraction of the price the nice thing is that it's actually super quick and easy to set everything up for my wedding my husband set up our uplights and it took him probably about a half hour to set up 40 up lights in our Banquet Hall. So if you want to go with the do-it-yourself uplighting here's how it works if you use our rental company over at rentmywedding so you'll just go to the website put in your wedding date and then pick how many up lights that you want. The up lights will be delivered right to your door. You set them up for the wedding and then afterwards you just pack everything back in the same box and you send it back using a prepaid return shipping label. So it's super easy. And it’s so convenient if you want to set up your own uplighting.

SUMMARY

Alright, so that is everything you need to know about uplighting. I hope you guys enjoyed learning about this type of wedding lighting. It’s definitely the number one most popular type of wedding lighting! Like I said before if you only do one kind of wedding lighting it's got to be up letting -- it honestly makes such a big difference is going to make your venue look amazing and your guests are going to love it! After almost ten years of renting uplighting, I have never once had a client tell me that they wish they hadn't done it. In fact, the only time that couples have had regrets about up lighting is that they wish that they would have done MORE uplighting! So you don't want to miss out make sure that you get up lighting for your wedding.

All right guys hold before I go. Please make sure you subscribe to a podcast and I would love it if you could leave us a review! You can get links to all of our episodes over at the podcast website. It's www.transformyourwedding.com. You can also click here to learn more about uplighting!