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Shooting Day For Night?
By Frey | June 27, 2007
If you are shooting day for night, here’s how to do it, and make it look more realistic:
With Film:
1. Shoot exteriors with Tungsten film (or use a tungsten filter on your daylight film). This gives a slightly bluer image, but doesn’t go overboard. Too much blue (pretty much anything more than tungsten) doesn’t look real.
2. Underexpose by two stops.
3. Shoot on a Sunny day.
4. Make sure to use reflectors and punch some light on the subjects face!
5. Try not to shoot the sky in the background.
We did this in Hunting Dragonflies. In the post-production process, I played around with it a little more to tweak it out to my specific wants. It worked like a charm - no one has ever asked if we shot day for night. We did break number 5 though in a shot or two, but no one has called me on it yet. Of course, I did have to play around with those shots a lot more…
With High Definition (or other video):
1. Buy a day for night filter OR White balance to a slightly yellowish card (don’t overdo it), or set it to tungsten (possibly called “interior”) if it allows that option.
2. Underexpose by two stops.
3. Shoot on a Sunny day.
4. Make sure to use reflectors and punch some light on the subjects face!
5. Try not to shoot the sky in the background, but if you do, you might be able to key it out in post with a decent Non-Linear Editor, After Effects, Shake, or Combustion.
Video is different than film - it doesn’t have latitude, so the sky may become blown out.
Watch for puffy clouds - those bright white ones may give your illusion away.
Go outside tonight and throughout the weekend - the Moon will be full on June 30th, so you’ll be able to get some first hand visuals on what the moonlight is really like. You get shadows, but they are no where near as strong as sunlight.
Of course, this is all only a guideline. You MUST do tests. Lots and Lots of tests. Don’t stop testing until you are extremely happy with your results.
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Topics: film, high definition, production |
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