FILM LIGHTING TECHNIQUES…DAY FOR NIGHT

Bruce Bisbey…please follow us at: https://dumbdogproductionsllc.blogspot.com

FILM LIGHTING TECHNIQUES

Day for night is a set of cinematic techniques used to simulate a night scene while filming in daylight. It is often employed when it is too difficult or expensive to actually shoot during nighttime. Because both film stocks and digital image sensors lack the sensitivity of the human eye in low light conditions, night scenes recorded in natural light, with or without moonlight, may be underexposed to the point where little or nothing is visible. This problem can be avoided by using daylight to substitute for darkness. When shooting day for night, the scene is typically underexposed in-camera or darkened during post-production, with a blue tint added. Additional effects are often used to heighten the impression of night.

As film stocks and video cameras have improved in light sensitivity, shooting day for night has become less common in recent years.

During the silent era of film, release prints were often tinted blue during night scenes to enhance the illusion. Although moonlight is not actually blue, it appears bluish to the human eye due to the Purkinje effect. To give a bluer appearance to scenes filmed in color, some techniques use 3200K tungsten-balanced rather than 5000K daylight-balanced film stock. The tungsten balance renders artificial lighting (street lights, headlights, lit windows, etc.) as white and unlit areas as "moonlight blue." With professional video cameras, color temperature adjustments are made to achieve the same effect. With digital post production now nearly universal, the color temperature adjustment is usually made in camera, to preserve the "white" artificial lights, but scene darkening is left to post production for finer control of the effect.

Underexposing the shot can add to the illusion of darkness or moonlight. It is typical to underexpose by about two f-stops. A neutral density filter is often used to achieve this darkening, so that the camera aperture remains unchanged.

Daytime sky can be darkened to simulate night. With black and white film, a red lens filter will turn a blue sky black. Infrared film is occasionally used for long shots, but it renders green foliage as white. Yellow or orange filters (Wratten 8 or 15) can be substituted for closer shots, to preserve the performers' flesh tones. With color film or video, a graduated neutral density filter can achieve a similar effect, as can a polarizing filter. Using either of these filters can limit camera movement during a shot, as the axis of a graduated filter must match the horizon, and the effect of the polarizing filter changes as the axis of the camera lens moves relative to the sun. If the scene is backlit by the sun for a "moonlight" rim light effect, faces and other foreground details may be too dark to see properly. Partially filling shadows with reflectors or a 5000K (daylight-balanced) key light can compensate for this. Even so, shadow areas are still slightly under-lit, to match the higher contrast of the overall scene.

With digital post-production techniques it is also common to add or intensify glare and light scattering from light sources that would otherwise be less pronounced in daylight, such as windows revealing indoor lighting, outdoor artificial lights, car headlights, and so on. Day for night techniques can be made more convincing through such digital effects. It is possible to digitally replace the entire sky to add the moon and stars, as was done for the film Cast Away. For the 2015 film Mad Max: Fury Road, an unusual variation of the technique was used, in which scenes were deliberately overexposed, rather than underexposed as is typically recommended. Taking advantage of the dynamic range of the digital cameras used on the production, the shots were then darkened and color-graded a bluish tint in post-production, with the result that detail was maintained in the shadows rather than being clipped, as might happen when underexposing.

Instead of shooting during midday, it is also common to shoot at dawn or dusk. During these periods, car headlights, streetlights, and interior lights are on, as they would be at night. This is sometimes referred to as "dusk for night." Shooting this way can be difficult because the desired lighting conditions last only a short time, during which both light levels and color temperatures are constantly changing.

Soft front light / hot backlight

A popular technique in film lighting is to use a soft (diffuse) light source from the front and a stronger, more directional light from the back, so that your subject has a hot edge. The soft frontal light is known as the fill light; the strong light at the back is known, unsurprisingly, as the backlight.

You can arrange the lights in such a way as to leave darkness between the area illuminated by the backlight and the area illuminated by the fill light, depending on how moody you want the shot to be. This tends to work very well, although even the moodiest films tend to avoid leaving dark shadows on the faces of female talent.

For a slightly different look, the backlight can also be soft, but it should still be hotter than the fill.

You should light your film or video shot by shot. This means that when you relocate the camera to shoot a different angle, the lights must be moved as well to ensure the subject is always lit correctly. This is partly why films take so long to shoot.

Setting up lights is the most time-consuming task in film shoots. It is therefore good practice to shoot a scene in such a way as to minimize the need to relocate lights – in other words, shoot in the order of the lighting set-ups.

Here’s a trick that can save huge amounts of time: when covering a scene with a shot and reverse shot, instead of moving the camera and lights for the reverse shot, simply switch the actors around and move the camera to the other side of the eye-line, in order to maintain the correct eye-line relationship. This allows you to use the same lighting set-up for two or more pairs of shots. Depending on the situation, it may help to move some props around too. It generally works best when the backgrounds of the two actors cannot be distinguished. This technique is not always appropriate, but in the right situation it can be totally convincing and a huge time-saver.

MIXING COLOR TEMPERATURES

Using lights of different color temperatures can be used to great effect. This simply means using lights of different color in the same shot. This was used to great effect by James Cameron in the steel mill scene of “Terminator 2”, in which he used blue and orange light (consistent with moonlight and molten steel respectively).

Mixed color temperatures (blue and orange) in a shot from Terminator 2 (Directed by James Cameron, DP Adam Greenberg)

The only caveat with this is that you must determine the relationship between the two different colors before filming, because it is not really possible, for example, to make the blue bluer without also making the orange bluer (i.e. less orange).

WHY FILMMAKING NEEDS LIGHTS

If you have ever been on a film set you will surely have noticed just how bright film lights are. To an untrained eye, mainstream film sets look drastically over-lit. Why are lights used in filmmaking? Surely if we want the film to look natural we should just turn up on location, set up the camera and shoot. Instead, we take enormous care to use film lights, which cost money and take ages to set up.

The reason for which lights are necessary in filmmaking is that film, and to an even greater extent video, does not respond to light the same way our eyes do. Specifically, film and video see things in a much more contrast way. In other words, they cannot cope with the lighting contrast of real life: if you shoot a scene without artificial lights, either the shadows will go completely black or the highlights will go completely white. All of this means that if you want a scene to look natural, ironically the only way to do that is to have enough light to make film see the scene the way our eyes see the scene.

In any case, there is more to cinematography than simply making the actors visible and photographing them. For top results, the mood of the film must be carefully crafted with lighting, amongst other things. Not to mention the fact that there are many situations in which natural light will not result in exposure at all. For example, there is no way you can do an exterior night shoot without lights, even if there is a full moon.

There are other considerations. For example, it has been noticed by many filmmakers and filmgoers that the best films present a heightened interpretation of reality; in other words, films that touch our hearts tend to offer a world that is “more real than real.” This is simply a way of saying that they are not bland. Presenting an enhanced view of reality involves using highly stylized lighting.

One of the biggest myths is that shooting video requires fewer lights than shooting on film. This is completely incorrect, because film can handle a much larger contrast range than video, and therefore suffers less if the lighting is excessively high-contrast. Video, on the other hand, has enormous problems looking even remotely decent when the lighting is not perfectly fine-tuned in such a way that the brightest spot in the scene it is no more than three stops hotter than the darkest point in the scene. Therefore, ironically, film is in theory the best choice when there is little or no control of the lighting, but the impressive lighting set-ups used on 35mm shoots has intimidated people into thinking that celluloid needs more light than video. The opposite is true.

The next time you have the pleasure of visiting a film set remember that things look flat and over-lit because they were lit for film, not for the human eye; the image will have much more texture, depth and contrast when you see it on celluloid on the big screen.

Another example has just come to mind: pools of soft light. They can be moody in film noir, but super-glamorous in a skin cream commercial.

1. Putting real film lights outside windows instead of relying on natural light – always worth it…

2. No color in your shots must ever be an accident…

3. A beautiful blue can be achieved with HMI lights and a digital camera set to tungsten balance…

4. A beautiful “Matrix”-style green can be achieved by shooting with regular fluorescent lights with the camera set to tungsten balance…

5. Soft pools of light on actors’ faces can produce a very interesting look…

6. Daylight-balanced light in the background with tungsten light from the front, with the camera set on tungsten balance…

7. Backlight vs. no backlight. The effect of backlight is clear: it increases contrast, reduces “muddiness” and enhances perceived sharpness…

8. Silhouetting — meaning dark subject against very bright background — is quite a dark technique…

Sources, References & Credits: Google, Wikipedia, Wikihow, Pinterest, IMDB, Linked In, Indie Wire, Cinema Blend, Variety, Creative Skill Set, No Film School, Cinema Blend, Science 20, Reddit, Michael Rabinger, Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics, Video Maker, English Oxford Dictionaries, LA Video Film Maker, Premium Beat, Business Weekly, Valve, Rain Dance, Elliot Grove, Film Maker Magazine, American Society of Cinematographers, British Society of Cinematographers, Alexis Van Hurkman, Color Correction Look Book: Creative Grading Techniques for Film and Video, Australian Cinematographers Society, Canadian Society of Cinematographers

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