How to Shoot with Only "Moonlight" | Cinematography Breakdown

We've all seen night exterior scenes lit, motivated by some kind of practical lights in the frame, whether it's a flashlight or a fire. But what if you're in the middle of nowhere where it doesn't make any sense to have any sort of lights and the only thing you can rely on is the moon? Before we go into that, what does night actually look like in the real world? I found this post by David Mullen ASC on Facebook and I thought it was really interesting. He took this photo in the middle of nowhere with only moonlight and did a long exposure of 30 seconds and this is what you get. You can see the hard shadows on the floor and that means the moonlight is actually a hard light just like the sun. The immediate response would be just to shoot everything during the day and bring down exposure in post and it will look like it's night, right? But shooting day for night also has its own problems. Let's look at this scene from House of Dragons and you can see from behind the scenes photos they actually shot this scene day for night and this is what it looks like on the day. And in post, they just brought the exposure and saturation down and it looks like this. Look at the waveform. It's so dark that I'm having a hard time seeing anything. It's a 12 minute scene with a sex sequence and a fight with the dragons and everything and all this time I was watching it, I was really struggling and it's no surprise that the reveals are horrible and there's a lot of people complaining about not being able to see what's happening. Although this is probably the closest to what our eye sees at night in reality, you have to take into account that most people are not going to watch this on a calibrated screen or in a light controlled environment. There's another problem that the sky during the day is much brighter than the ground compared to what it is like during the night. So it's a dead giveaway that this is a day for night because the sky is just so much brighter even after they bring the exposure down in post. Let's look at a day for night scene that I think is actually done right. This is a scene from the movie Nope shot by Hoyt Van Hoytma and there's a great video explaining how they did it and I'll put the link down below but basically they built this camera rig where there's a prison system that splits the light into two cameras, one into the 65mm film camera and another one into a digital alexa 65 that shoots infrared and both cameras gets the same exact view so that the image can be overlaid on top of each other and the film camera is used to capture the color and texture information while the digital camera gets a black and white image but because it is infrared the sky will be completely black and in post they can just replace the sky very easily and composite a CG sky with the right amount of clouds and UFO and the foreground element with the actors still has good color information because it is film and they can just bring down the exposure to make it look like a night. And then they can just combine the CG element of the sky and the foreground element and now you get this. The whole rig is also on a stabilized head so they can move the camera however they want and shoot very wide shots for the scope that they want. I can say the result is amazing. It's also a plus that the movie is intended to be seen on an IMAX screen in theaters. You and I probably don't have the budget to do this but now at least you know how it's done. Alright, let's look at another approach where you shoot night for night and just use lighting to make it look like a night. This is a scene from No Country for Old Men shot by Roger Deakins. So the challenge here is lighting such a big area at night. Not only do you have to light the actors, you also have to light the entire background and the space behind them. So the light needs to be very powerful and very far away because light falls off exponentially with distance. I found some lighting diagrams on Roger Deakins' website and for this scene he used the Musco lights which is basically 12 of the 6K HMI lamps on a crane. It is actually used to light stadiums and he had two of those units just flooding the hills with the light in the background and they also serve as a side slash backlight for the actor and it's put in a place where it would be not too frontal based on the actor's walking. And on the floor closer to the actors they had a bounce to catch the light to wrap around the actor's face for a softer feel. And sometimes they would use additional units like a Joker 400 to bounce more light into actor's face. And I noticed it also serves as an eye light in some of the shots because this bounce is closer to the actor's eye line and we can catch it in their eyes. For this shot of the car driving up the hill you can see this glowing blue light behind the hill. He used 7 12K HMIs behind the hill and just pointing them upwards at the sky and whatever dust is in the air just reflected this light and gave this nice silhouette on the hill. For this shot where it's supposed to be sunrise it's actually shot during sunset and they basically did a dusk for dawn. And you can see the lighting here has a lot more shape and contrast in the day for night approach and it's just generally more visually appealing to me. This approach requires a lot of budget for lighting and you also need many grip and electric crew and also time to pre-light the space. But this is what you need to make it look good if you want to see this amount of space during night. Alright, let's look at another slightly different approach. This is scene from Django Unchained shot by Bob Richardson. This is not completely moonlight but let's see how he light this scene especially the wide shots. These guys start charging down the hills. They had a backlight there behind the hills on the smoke but this is what you get without any lighting. The floor would be completely dark and all you'll see is just the flames. In this shot they come into this area and suddenly there's just some top ambient light. In this shot, it's just full on top light. We can see the floor being lit up and in the behind the scenes clip you can just see there are two huge soft boxes on cranes and just shining down to the floor and that's what's giving this top ambient light and lighting up the entire floor. You can actually see the lighting area in the shot and the light just falls off dramatically outside because the light is square and it's very directional. Anything outside, it'll just be completely dark. This is a more stylized approach and it works for this film because everything in Quentin's film are exaggerated and not subtle basically. I would say this approach is probably the most common one used in modern cinematography. Basically having these huge soft boxes in the sky on cranes and in different places and you can just turn them on and off or dim them up and down depending on the direction you're shooting. I like to go back to David Mullen's post where he mentioned shooting night exterior has a fundamental problem because you're almost always faking the light one way or another especially when you are relying mostly on moonlight motivations. So it's a very subjective call on how dark you want to go and your approach to lighting will be influenced by the budget and the scale of the project you're working with and also the mood you want to go for. Alright, that's it for today's video. If you like it, please subscribe because I will keep doing these and bye.