In this video, filmmaker Ryan Swain discusses the process of lighting day for night scenes in films and videos. He suggests softening and spreading light to create a more natural appearance, which can be achieved by bouncing key light off a bounce board or diffusing it through a grid. Color correction and color grading are crucial for convincing day for night footage.
Low-light cameras like the Sony A7S and Canon C300 offer incredible possibilities for shooting night exterior scenes without any lights. However, day exteriors can still be intimidating to light. In this video, Ryan shares five essential strategies for success on day exterior shoots.
Filmmakers use day for night shooting to capture exterior scenes that appear to take place at night. They carefully choose the time of day, usually during the “golden hour” just before sunset or after sunrise. Shooting day for night is a clever trick that involves manipulating light and color to convince the audience it’s a different time of day.
To achieve the best results, it is essential to recognize when something is unlit and to shoot with lower exposure. To avoid harsh shadows, shoot with lower exposure and know when to show.
For outdoor shoots during the day, use natural back light and bounce/diffuse when necessary. Forest light is typically the best for filming outside because it’s filtered. By following these tips, filmmakers can create stunning day for night scenes that capture the essence of the night.
📹 4 Ways to Light Night Exteriors
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📹 Lighting Exterior Night Shots with ONE LIGHT! | Filmmaking Tips
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This is a really great breakdown and it looked fun on set. When gaffing a moonlit exterior, I would heighten the magic realism of the scene and consider the core story elements to find ways G&E could push a more surreal, fantasy-based look while keeping the scene grounded. For this example, I would push the cookie/gobo situation in confusing the viewer’s eye with a rotating zoetrope of treebranch cookies/gobos from an Arri 1K tungsten fresnel as a backlight, gelled to CTG, accompanied by another set of treebranch cookies/gobos striking from an Arri 650w tungsten fresnel gelled with CTB, dimmed into the scene as the talent walks from the darkness and into the soft keylight. For fill, the scene would be bounced with Arri 300w tungsten fresnels gelled with CTR striking into unbleached muslin to give the scene even more of a heightened awareness that something is very off story-wise, through the overall fill and red tone.
This obsession with making things look ‘beautiful’ is a curse of modern cinema. With all respect to everyone involved, these scenes looked overly lit, unnecessarily ‘well lit’ and just a bit meh as a result. Literally point one light at your actor’s face and work it from there. Embrace the dark, shadows are beautiful too.
moral of the story? goto the hardware store and buy some super cheap flood lights so you don’t have to screw around with a huge amount of masking work in post. You can move your camera and you can also film cut aways and pick up shots and you know… actual film making stuff. Instead of being tied down to one shot. Multiple takes for the same shot and spending a huge amount of time in post simply because you cant spend 20$ on some flood lights from a hardware store.