Why It's So Difficult To Shoot Night Scenes During The Day

There's a cool thing happening in this scene in Jordan Peele's note. You may notice it starts out pretty dark, then slowly gets brighter. Here, you can't see the logo on OJ's hat, but two minutes later, in a nearly identical shot, you can. It's an incredibly subtle trick that cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema used to emulate how our eyes naturally respond to darkness. We build up, it sort of fades in, that are very slow, but that simulate very much your pupil dilations. But what makes this subtle trick possible is that this nighttime scene was shot in the daytime. Day for night is a technique Hollywood has used for years, but it hasn't always produced convincing results or clearly visible ones, as seen in shows like House of the Dragon. So how did Hollywood get to this point? Here, you might be wondering, why wouldn't filmmakers just film their nighttime scenes at night? And in reality, many do, taking advantage of artificial lighting and today's more sensitive digital camera sensors. But neither modern digital camera sensors nor traditional film have the sensitivity of the human eye in low-light scenarios. That means that often, when night scenes are filmed in natural lighting conditions, very little of the shot is visible. This is why Hollywood often films what's called day for night, shooting nighttime scenes in daylight and using cinematic techniques to create the illusion of darkness. Francois Truffaut even paid homage to the technique in a movie called Day for Night. One standard way to shoot day for night is by filming against a blue screen and creating a totally CG environment. But many filmmakers, like Jordan Peele on Nope, want the grounded reality of shooting as much as possible out in the field. When shooting on location, traditional day for night techniques typically involve manipulating the color grading, adding a bluish tint, and upping the contrast on the image until it resembles night, or using smoke, dust, or sand, and creating fake silhouettes. The most famous examples of these techniques all shared a similar challenge as Nope, filming on location in vast desert landscapes, capturing expanses of land and sky that are just too big to light when filming at night. But the combination of these techniques can create a slightly artificial look, one that Jordan and Hoyte refer to as movie nights. They noticed the movie nights aesthetic in their visual references for Nope, including older Westerns and the 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia. But to go beyond the limited aesthetic of traditional day for night filming, they'd have to get much more technical and creative. Their goal was to capture the way the human eye sees at night, not the way a camera sees, like the way our eyes gradually adjust to darkness. Stare at this dark shape, or for that matter, just imagine it. Turns out, just thinking about dark spaces can start to dilate our pupils so that we can take in more visual information. Like Nope, Mad Max Fury Road emulated this transition subtly by starting its night scene out pretty dark to sell the night, then slowly making it brighter. Once our eyes are adjusted, there's the question of how to replicate the level of fine detail that we can perceive at night. Productions often struggle to nail this down, especially because when filming day for night, DPs usually underexpose the scenes by three or four stops, planning to make them as dark as possible. However, underexposed day for night scenes are often rendered so dark to compensate for the daytime that you can barely make out anything at all. Audiences have complained about this limited visibility in modern TV shows like House of the Dragon, which was shot in full day and then darkened a lot in post. Selective use of light can help make scenes more legible to viewers. In Pan's Labyrinth, DP Guillermo Navarro was going for an eerie effect, so he drilled tiny holes in the sets to allow some light to leak in. In the giant frog scene, he lit Ophelia's face with a fiber-optic light attached directly to the camera. Other films have gone the opposite direction. Mad Max wanted viewers to be able to follow every shot of its big nighttime set piece, so the team massively overexposed the photography to ensure they captured all the detail in the shadows. The effect worked well on Mad Max because of the dynamic range of the digital cameras used on the film and because of the stylized night look that they were going for, which was supposed to look realistic, but not photorealistic, so they could afford to make it less dark and more blue. Mad Max also used a lot of sky replacements, and skies are, in fact, often the biggest giveaways when filming day for night. When a scene's darkened in post, the skies often still look bright relative to the rest of the shot, so we can feel the day leak through. To create authentic night skies on Nope, Huerta pulled from earlier work on Ad Astra, where he had experimented with infrared cameras to create the black skies of the moon chase sequence. There's very little ambient light on the moon, so it's a very weird hybrid of day and night. We needed to shoot a rover chase on the moon's surface, which is a gigantic area, something we couldn't light up, so you end up with a black and white image that has very good light levels and a light relationship between lightness and darkness, but then you have to figure out a way to get color back, and you could think about coloring it by hand, but we were thinking, well, we're shooting this on film, what if we could combine those two cameras together and then just mix the color back in selectively where we want it? You use one camera to tell you the relationship of the light levels between everything, and then you use the other camera to gather, like, color information and film grain and such things. By shooting natural sunlight with infrared cameras and then giving it a slight contrast boost, you end up with images that are brightly lit, but with dark skies, which worked perfectly for Nope. But this time, Huerta had to restructure the rig for the super-heavy, large-format cameras that he and Jordan were working with. So we ramped it up because this one we shot on 65-millimeter film, so we had to rebuild the rig for a 65-millimeter film camera. While the cameras were ready to shoot, the rig was heavy and pretty unbalanced, and a lot of the night sequences in Nope were major action set pieces where the crew had to follow running horses and actors and couldn't be limited in how they could move the rig around. So they stabilized the rig by attaching it to a specially retrofitted camera car. A lot of the action that we shot over the field, we shot from an instrument called the etch. It's a car with an arm which has a very big, stabilized head on there. The rig also allowed for a more dynamic shoot by addressing one of the limitations of traditional day-for-night, needing the sun exactly in the right place when filming. Typically, depending on the time of day, the sun can cast harsh, overly dramatic shadows that filmmakers want to avoid. If you do traditional day-for-night, the quality of the image is so dependent on your light direction. Day-for-night works very nice if you have backlit. It works not very well if you're frontlit. Typically, filmmakers get around this by carefully positioning the actors with their backs to the sun to create a rim light effect that resembles moonlight. With the infrared rig, we found that it was much easier. We didn't have to be as precious about light direction as you traditionally need to be for day-for-night. In post, the VFX team merged the digital infrared footage with the color film footage in a process that almost resembles colorizing an old black-and-white movie, except instead of inventing the colors, they could extract them from the film camera photography, which captured all the vital color and texture information. This allowed the filmmakers on NOPE to capture more detail, important for how Jordan wanted the audience to experience the movie. Instead of pushing the thriller forward by relying on the blunt force of the dark night and sound effects, he wanted to encourage the audience to actively look into the darkness and start seeing things for themselves. Traditionally, cinematographers hide things in the shadow, you know, and there's darkness, but you see just what the cinematographer needs you to see. But here, we wanted, at first, to put you at a place and give you that scope, and then, within that, sort of play with these little elements. Yeah, nah, nah, nah. Combining the color with the infrared also helped the team nail the correct relationships between light and dark parts of each shot. We were, of course, being very analytical about how your eye perceives different colors at night, the way that, for instance, foliage and green is much brighter at night than a lot of other colors, the fact that the light on ground level is very often brighter than what you get from the sky. You know, the sky plays a very big role in NOPE, so we also want to be able to feel the sky and feel the differences in density and where there's overcast, where there's clouds, or where there's moonlight, et cetera, et cetera. In post, the team sprinkled in additional details to emphasize the full richness and depth of the night scenes. Visual effects went back at night, shot very specific plates of practical lights in the distance to then add it to those pictures. And for me, these little things are really the cherry toppings on the cake. It totally completes it and sort of finishes it. Looking up at the mountain ridge, there's these telegraph poles, and they have these tiny little red blinking lights on them. And in your monochromatic view of night, you see those little red dots blinking, and suddenly you're looking at a picture that has full saturation to it and full depth. But one last piece was missing. This is shot in California, and you get very little clouds. The story of NOPE is very specific at the mouse game, in which Gene Jekyll is hiding in clouds and moving from one cloud to the other. So the VFX team added digital cloudscapes created from modular sets of hundreds of 3D-modeled clouds altered to match the light of the combined infrared color footage. The VFX team also added drifting shadows of the clouds to connect the sky with the ground. And in NOPE, this tech and partnership between camera and visual effects made the movie nights feel every bit as real, immersive, and expansive as how Jordan and Hoyta experienced them on location.