Day for Twilight?

[Eric Boellner]

I'm curious if any of you pros can help me out. For something I'm writing, there's going to be several scenes that are supposed to take place in the desert at twilight. The problem is, one of the locations I want to use is only accessible by about a 5-mile hike through some pretty rough terrain (complete with the standard desert wildlife a la rattlers and scorpions), so obviously, I wouldn't want to lead even a skeleton crew through this terrain after dark. But the problem is, it's specifically supposed to take place around magic hour, with no direct sunlight (or hard lighting source) casting shadows.

But it's also in the desert, so there's not much chance of getting lucky with an overcast sky. Anyway, my question is: Is it possible to shoot a sunny daylight on a DSLR, and either use an in-camera filter or WB adjustment, or a combination of in-camera and post-production digital manipulation to make a noon-ish desert exterior look like it was shot at magic hour?

I know it's kind of a specific problem, and I'm a long way off from having to actually find a solution to it, but as a good deal of screen time is set to take place in this location at twilight, I want to tackle the problem now so that if I DO only have that actual magic hour to shoot in, I can compromise and change the location in the script at the outline stage, rather than waiting till actual production to realize I've set half the film in a location I can't access at the time I need it.

-EMB

I'll be using a Rebel T4i, by the way. Only have a very small lighting package, but I wouldn't even be able to feasibly take that on-location anyway, so it'd have to be natural lighting with filters or post-pro effects.

 

[Eric Boellner]

Oops, forgot to post pictures of the kind of look I'm shooting for. Something like these. No direct sunlight or visible lighting source, with a magic hour look.

 

[Michael Carter]

What are the chances of an overcast day coming up? Day for night with hard sun... there's not much you can do to get that softness of real twilight.

Have you considered camping? Even by yourself, shoot establishing at dusk and dawn - then bring scrims for mid and closeups. You could even shoot plates and key in talent for establishing shots - scrim off a parking lot, put up a green screen, even prop the ground around talent's feet with rocks, tumbleweeds, etc for a much easier comp. (OK, I love to camp & hike). Use frame grabs and a monitor to shoot correct perspective of your talent. If your shots are distant enough, you could even do some basic pans and track talent in - AE CC has pretty good tracking.

Especially if you could get talent to camp out, you wouldn't need much crew for establishing stuff - have your crew come in after sunrise.

Hike out late afternoon - shoot sunset. Cook some food and have some cocktails. Up before sunrise, shoot some more, crew shows up at full light with scrims/butterfiles, everyone out by dark.

That sounds extreme, but it's the ghetto version of production trailers spending nights on remote sets.

 

[clang]

You're unlikely to be able to fake 'magic hour' convincingly - it's called that precisely because the light is different to any other time of day, much to the dismay of DOPs who love to use it. Your best chance would be an overcast day, but as you've already noted, those aren't too common in your location, and in any case wouldn't help you with shots with a visible sky (unless all shots had an overcast sky).

But talking about shots does raise a partial workaround - close up shots where the background is out of focus may be relatively doable at other times of day (or even at another more convenient location), so long as you have a good supply of scrims and reflectors etc to light your actors, and someone to fiddle light and colour levels in post. But do some tests before trying that for real - it may be more trouble than it's worth.

 

[CharlesPapert]

Convincingly shooting under direct noon sun and turning it into a magic hour look requires a significant amount of grip gear (butterfly overhead, bounce to fill level back in, reflectors to create low angle backlight etc). Anything wider than a closeup, all of the above need to move back and often become bigger. If you need to shoot wider than waist up, you are talking a serious setup to work well, one that is prohibitive given a 5 mile hike.

Overcast is easier to shoot in all directions than sunlight, but it will always look like what it is: flat. Even though magic hour, like overcast, doesn't have directional light (except for one sky direction being hotter than the others), it has a very different quality.

 

[Eric Boellner]

Thanks for the responses, guys. I figured it would be hard/impossible to reproduce that look. I'll just work around it in the script now, then. Thanks again for the help!

-EMB