Shooting day for night
Posted on Jan 24, 2025
Lighting a night exterior can be costly, logistically clumsy and restrictive for vistas – but the alternative remains creatively precarious
WORDS | Adrian Pennington
Shooting day for night is as old as the hills in filmmaking terms, although its use has diminished as the light sensitivity of digital cameras has improved. However, you don’t need a large budget or top-of-the-line equipment to shoot night scenes. Shooting day for night is both a practical and effective way to go.
“Lighting is always about control,” says gaffer Julian White (The Martian, The Midnight Sky, Murder on the Orient Express). “Whenever we are scouting for night exteriors, someone will propose day for night; everybody initially thinks it’s a good idea, but it’s actually risky because you’re at the behest of the weather.
“If you are shooting outdoors in an open landscape day for night, you need continuous sun; otherwise, your light values will keep going up and down. That’s difficult in places like England, but better in locations such as California or Spain, where there’s less likelihood of rain or clouds. “You always shoot into the sun, so it’s always a backlight. Everything in front of it becomes backlit and thus goes into shadow. Your first challenge is to control both the backlight and the front light, continually balancing them.”
Controlling the lighting may require employing neutral density (ND) filters to reduce the amount of light entering the camera, adding artificial light to mimic the look of nighttime, or both. “Traditional black & white films would put a heavy ND on the lenses and then shoot,” explains White. “The problem is that, by reducing the overall stop so much, your actors will end up overexposed. And if you blast lights into their faces, it makes things difficult for them because they’ll be blinking.”
Day-for-night shoots often have a cooler colour temperature, so adjusting the white-balance of the camera could help simulate nighttime. Since moonlight is often thought to have a blue hue, setting the temperature to 3200K can help sell the illusion. The look can also be enhanced in post by adding elements such as stars.
A common giveaway of ineffective day-for-night footage is the look of the shadows cast by performers and objects. Daytime and nighttime shadows look markedly different, and it can be quite difficult to replicate nighttime shadows during the day. “Back or side-lighting actors with the sun and closing down to prevent their hair from having that glamorous glow is a good place to start,” adds White.
“Of course, you want to see the actors’ faces, so you’ll need to fill them. But this is where you can deviate from a daylight look by using less fill or only filling part of the actors’ faces. It’s a balancing act.” He also advises paying close attention to practical lights when shooting day for night. “Not only do you need to avoid direct sunlight, but it also helps with realism if nighttime practical light sources are visible and casting light.”
These days, most DOPs will choose day for night for the surreal look it gives. John Seale, ACS, ASC did this for scenes in Mad Max: Fury Road. “There’s no way you could light up a huge western-style landscape at night any other way because of the huge amount of space and the expense of cranes,” shares White.
To shoot the alien atmosphere of Nope, Hoyte van Hoytema, ASC made a rig to shoot two identical versions of the same frame by utilising two cameras at the same time. One camera used 65mm film, which captured vital colour and texture information. The other was an ARRI ALEXA customised to shoot infrared. Since infrared sensors are sensitive to specific wavelengths of light, the images are monochromatic. Shooting in natural sunlight with a slight contrast boost led to brightly lit images with dark skies.
Florian Hoffmeister, BSC modified this technique using a stereo 3D rig to film exteriors against white snow in the eternal twilight of the Arctic Circle for True Detective: Night Country. He fitted the infrared camera with a semi-circle of infrared lights and composited the stereo images in post. “You either embrace the look for what it is or try and smooth it out, but that’s probably the wrong way to go,” admits White. “Either way, use it sparingly because it can be quite jarring.”
Others have taken this even further. Greig Fraser, ASC, ACS had the idea that sunlight in the Harkonnen world in Dune: Part Two would kill colour – washing out everything the sun touches. He used infrared lights visible to an infrared camera, while also using LED lights the camera could not detect, shooting with two cameras and different light sources.
Łukasz Żal also shot infrared for The Zone of Interest, but here, the rest of the picture is so bleak that these scenes represent hope amid the darkness.
This story appears in the January 2025 issue of Definition
