Day For Night

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dirtee1

Member
Hello dudes,

First of all sorry if this has been asked before but the search turned up very little.

I'm looking to shoot a day for night scene in a park with a Canon XM2. Can I hear some suggestions for the workflow? I've read about two approaches - white balancing the camera and underexposing or changing the color balance and levels in post. Which has worked best for you?\

Also, what are my chances of combining both night for night and day for night scenes belieavably in my movie? (an example of this is Battle Royale, that Japanese movie)

Thanks in advance!
 
Day for night scene with WB will always have a blue tint to it where where the dark area are. I would definitely recommend achieving the effect using this method instead of trying in post. Sometimes you get lucky and it looks ok, but most of the time you get this in-between hybrid that kills the illusion. It's also harder to plan the shot because you never can tell if a patch of sky will be too bright to correct in post.

Matching real night shot with fake night shot is possible as long as you make sure to light the real shot exactly the same (blue tint), which seems like it's more trouble than it's worth.
 
In camera will probably yield the best results, go with a blue tint
as mentioned avoid like the plague skylines, and watch out for glare on cars or surfaces..

You can have an overhead light source to act as the moon if you want, but otherwise in camera is your best bet.
As for matching real night footage and day for night thaty might get tricky..
 
faultygoblin said:
In camera will probably yield the best results, go with a blue tint
as mentioned avoid like the plague skylines, and watch out for glare on cars or surfaces..

Ah, thanks, it makes a lot of sense!

You can have an overhead light source to act as the moon if you want, but otherwise in camera is your best bet.
As for matching real night footage and day for night thaty might get tricky..
Click to expand...

Well, I'm not actually combining footage from the two techniques in one scene, but using a different technique for each scene.
 
If there are cars driving in the shot, turn their headlights on (if possible). Same for any houses or bussiness in the BG, if there's windows in the BG, turn a lamp on inside the house. This will help sell the illusion more.
 
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