Day for Night: Part 2,398,582

Gideon Oakes

Gideon Oakes

Member
Hi everyone,

I've been scouring the forum for the answer to this question for two full days now, and I haven't found exactly what I'm looking for. I hate redundancy as much as anyone else, but I feel this begs posting.

I'm going to be shooting a feature this fall, and a full half of the film is going to be outside, in the woods. Very remote location, fairly thick woods. I'll attach a couple pictures of our location at the bottom.

I plan to do a lot of day for night shooting, and have been brushing up on the technique a lot. Here's what I want to know, though. If I turn the image blue in post, and I have a character with a flashlight, how do I keep the flashlight beam from turning blue with everything else? This seems to be a tricky situation.

I see my two options as this:

A) Light the entire freakin' forest with blue gels over the lights. This way, the flashlight will still appear white.

B) Take the hit in reality and just suck it up that I have blue flashlight beams.

Your thoughts, DVX brethren/sisters?


PICTURES:
wolfman24.jpg

wolfman41.jpg

wolfman49.jpg

wolfman20.jpg
 
Don't go too blue for night. If you're in the shade try to get the msot powerful flashlight (or rig a small hand held spot light if it's far enough away).
You could garbage matte and do a lumi key off the flash light beam or you can roto the beam.
Note that you probably won't see the beam itself unless you have some mist/fog (natural or made) Taht means jus the flashlight tip and the groudn where it hits will be lit up.
 
Oh yes, I forgot to mention, we will have "atmosphere". I own three fog machines, and we'll have a creepy little mist going. It'll be fun. I don't plan to shoot any sound during this time, as I'll most likely need a generator (each machine is 400W, and my power inverter only does 400W at its peak). I'll have plenty of music and foley to cover it, though.
 
Cut out a circle from a yellow gel and place it over the front of the flash light. The yellow light will become close to white again when you cc to blue. Of course, experiment first.

Jerry
 
Ooooh! Do you think that would work, XCheck? Has anyone else done this? I had given that a thought before I posted, but I figured it wouldn't work. Granted, I haven't done much color correction before. But I'm intrigued.

Also, that's really cool, ti3ucuong.
 
Gideon Oakes said:
Ooooh! Do you think that would work, XCheck? Has anyone else done this? I had given that a thought before I posted, but I figured it wouldn't work.
Click to expand...
It depends how you cc for night. If you use channel mixing (which is what I'd do), with bias toward blue, that's precisely what would happen - yellow becomes more neutral (not white, but closer to light grey). You'd probably have to do additional curve correction to increase contrast and bring the said light grey out.

I just tried it with the first of your pictures. I put a yellow blob on it (R=255, G=255, B=128) and played with it in Photoshop - it worked out reasonably well, for a fifteen minutes test, IMO.

Here they are:

First the yellow blob
wolfman24a.jpg


Then I added a channel mixer layer so that the yellow blob would become perfectly neutral (R=G=B=178)
wolfman24b.jpg


And then I increased contrast by streching the middle section of the RGB curve:
wolfman24c.jpg
You'd probably want to make the midtones a little darker still...
 
Sweet! Yeah, that beats the heck out of floodlighting the entire area blue (which I still might do for some closeups, but this method may just work out really well). :-)
 
best adive is u need a compositer and tell him what you want to do so then let him tell you waht to shoot so he beable to make it hapend.if the whole scene kinda in in shade and the touch will stand out then u can juse lum key it out. also yelow will turn white if u add blue in the scene but look at my 1 i didnt put much blue in at all
 
I acually took your raw shot and used the Day for Night filter

http://www.riverrockstudios.com/riverrock/pages/dayfornight.html

on it, and it acually looks extremely convincing. If you do that along with the yellow filter over the flashlight it should work. I put that filter over it twice and messed with the settings to get it to look really good.

i would post the jpg but i cant figure out how.....and i have a feeling its really simple, so if u let me know how to post a photo, i will show u wut i did

-Matt-
 
If you wouldn't mind sending it to me at gideon (at) rushmore (dot) tv, I'd appreciate it. I'll post it up for everyone to see. Thanks!
 
are you trying to blow this up to 35mm? if so would using a filter while shooting pose any problems for you? I'm just wondering.
 
We're going straight to the DVD market (we already have a couple of outlets interested), BUT... if the DVD does well and a movie distributor wants it, who am I to say 'never'? What would you suggest? I'm extremely open to new ideas, as we're still a month out before we shoot.
 
I just talked to a videographer who has done a shoot(day-night) on the DVX100 for a feature(35mm), and he used a filter(ND filter) and f-stop -2. he was very pleased. He said that the key to making it work is backlighting and the use of relections. I'm brand new to this but he has been at it for years.
good luck.
 
I am a bit worried whether the torch beam will show up at all during the day. I think the daylight will drown the torch out almost completely unless you shoot at dawn/dusk.
 
mmm said:
I am a bit worried whether the torch beam will show up at all during the day. I think the daylight will drown the torch out almost completely unless you shoot at dawn/dusk.
Click to expand...
Yes - that's a valid concern. Shooting at dawn/dusk ads blue tint to the scene, as well, so it helps to create the illusion of a night scene. And one should always use the most poweverful flashlight you can get.
 
Use the three way color corrector, make the mids blue, that will make the forest blue . Since a flashlight is HIGHLIGHTS, it will be unaffected. Tint the highlights towards orange just to be safe.
 
I'm not sure if you have already shot your film or not but I thought I'd give you one quick word of advice. If you've ever worked with fog before it glows like crazy in light. You might want to do a quick test to see if the fog is going to blow out to easily with all the sunlight beaming into it. Someone mentioned earlier about the flashlight beam being hard to see in the fog that's what made me think of this. The sun might light all the fog up.

Good Luck on your shoot, Have Fun!
 
mmm said:
I am a bit worried whether the torch beam will show up at all during the day. I think the daylight will drown the torch out almost completely unless you shoot at dawn/dusk.
Click to expand...


Think you could put one in using something like After Effects? A little rotoscoping and you have not only the "beam" but the ability to expose the true footage and get original colors back.
 
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