Day for Night

[saschmeling]

I am trying to shoot a forest amphitheatre scene creating a night fire scenario. I had planned on shooting at night- had a 10K skypan for ambience, several 2K's with flicker boxes and shooting through the flames of individual fires to create the scene.

 

Trouble is now that we are a week out from shooting we lost our night permits. The residents in the area weren't happy about us shooting all night. We can still use the location during the day however.

 

The amphitheatre we are using is open to the sky with a few trees providing some mixed cover and shadows. The weather is supposed to be sunny next weekend which will cause shadow problems and overall look issues.

 

One idea I've been toying with is to get a large camouflage canopy cover and try to break up the sky. Trouble I have with this is shadow issues again.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do?

 

Please help.

[Rik Andino]

Well the this time of year it gets really dark fairly early say Fiveish

 

So if you shoot from 5 to 10 that's five hours and that's not all night

Maybe your producer can try negoiating that.

 

It's very difficult to shoot day for night

(But not as difficult as night for day :) )

You've got to underexpose 2stops or more the surroundings and the background

Then you can light your subjects to where you want them

Can't do low angle shots and never show the sky

And try to keep wide shots to a minimum.

 

But ultimately day for night will always look strange.

Last year I shot a scene on a very dark cloudy day

Hoping if I underexposed it by 2 stops it'd look dark enough for night

I light my subject 2stops over the background to create contrast and shadows

 

But in the end it was still not contrasty enough to read night.

(also them vision 2 stocks got too much latitude sometimes)

It just looks strange even after we tweaked it in post.

 

If you want to see a recent attempt of day for night

Look at POINT BREAK (the night surfing scene was shot during the day)

I still say it looks strange but the movie is great so I love.