Mixing day-for-night and actual night footage

[Sam Eilertsen]

Hey all,

So the production manager of a feature I'm working on approached me with a conundrum. Most of the movie takes place at night so most of our shooting is overnights, however there are only 15 days of shooting and given that we're shooting in July he's concerned that we won't have enough hours of actual night. He asked to what extent we could push it into the evening or morning. I've heard a lot of discussion about how far into the evening you can continue to shoot when shooting for daylight, but what about the opposite?

My initial thought was that before the sun is actually visible over the horizon, the daylight will be dim enough that bright lighting will overwhelm it as long as we aren't looking at the sky, we may see a little blue in the background or the shadows but to some extent this can be passed off as "moonlight".

However, I thought that mixing day-for-night effect footage with footage shot at night would probably be very jarring. Day-for-night doesn't really look like night, it's a stylized look that viewers accept as night. He talked about using a black cloth backdrop or greenscreen, the former of which I'm skeptical of although it might look OK in closeups, the latter would be more work than I think they want to pay for and the presence of daylight on faces would still cause problems I think

Some scenes take place indoors, and the only concern is window light, for that I think blacking them out will do just fine.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

[David Mullen ASC]

I wouldn't mix day-for-night and night-for-night unless you are in a jungle or deep forest where the background isn't very far back. It would be better to lighten the schedule of night exterior scenes, either rewrite them for day or rewrite them for interior. Once you've done that, your next step would be to find a whole sequence that could be done mostly day-for-night so that at least it has a consistent look internally. "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" has a sequence like that, where Lincoln and Speed ride a wagon through an empty plantation (day-for-night with digital painting to add some lit windows when looking at the main mansion). But it helps that the scene is surrounded by trees, not broad sky, and that it is motivated that the slave quarters look abandoned, so no internal lighting.

"Rambo: First Blood" has a jungle sequence that mixes some day-for-night, twilight, and night-for-night but it's a bit easier in a deep jungle.