Day into night through VFX
- Giovanni Peresson
- Mar 9, 2023
- 5 min read
By Giovanni Peresson 09/03/2023
Concept
This was a concept I was originally interested in in the past. For a project for my cinematography
module, last semester we were tasked with recreating a scene from a film and the film my partner
(Callum Kelly) had decided to do was a scene from El Camino (2019). The scene in question was set during the night but due to the visual quality loss experience, I had come up with the idea of filming during daylight hours and during post-production to use colour grading and adding artificial lights to give the illusion that scene was shot at night.
When researching this idea, I stumbled across a film I had watched recently at the time, NOPE (2022) which used this very technique but using much more advanced methods far out of reach from what I was capable of with my equipment but followed the same premise although they used two cameras, a Panavision 65mm film camera and an Arri Alexa 65 infrared camera. As you can see from the rig down below they used both simultaneously. They had aligned both cameras perfectly so that both would get identical images and of course, the infrared camera essentially filmed in an extremely flat colour profile in post they combined the footage from both cameras and using colour grading achieved an extremely convincing day to night.
This has already been an idea I have produced in the past but using the same footage I have recreated it but looking much better and the addition of lighting a visible streetlamp in the foreground really bumped up the illusion and production value. I am going to be going over how I created this project and what I have learnt from it and how it can improve my future projects.
What to think of When shooting
When shooting using this technique there are two very important steps to keep in mind to really make the most of it and achieve the best final result for your own projects.
The first is to avoid having the sun in frame completely or as little as possible, when using this technique the sun can be your nemesis, seeing the sun in your shots will affect the illusion of it being night time, it is possible to blend it out in post but it’s much more efficient to avoid it altogether.
The other step which is vital in my opinion is to film in the flattest colour profile you can with your equipment. Using flatter colour profiles will give you much more control when colour grading, this also applies to colour grading as a whole, using a flat colour profile such as log will give you a blank canvas you can paint essentially.
The Edit
The first step, of course, was importing my media to Premiere pro and trim it down to what I wanted the result to look like.
I then adjusted the basic colour correction and white balance to give a dark blue hue to the whole image.
I then adjusted the RGB colour to further darken the whites and light colours (the sky in this case)
As a last touch for the colour grading, I decided to add a little bit of vignette on the outside of the frame, this is an optional step really up to personal preference but for this scene, I decided it looked good
Once I was satisfied with the colour grading, I then added a yellow-orange gradient circle which I used directional blur to stretch it and give it a glow. I sized it and placed it right on the streetlamp and went frame by making sure it was positioned correctly.
In the end, I ended up keying every frame and it looked like this.
What have I learned?
This not being my first time attempting this I was able to fine-tune what I had learnt the first time around. The addition of lighting the streetlamps really added that extra detail which wasn’t there the last time around, I took the inspiration from my last project the CGI Bullet being fired from a revolver where I used masks and colour grading to create the light which would be emitted from the muzzle flash. It was very time-consuming having to go frame by frame there are probably much easier methods I could’ve used to achieve this. I didn’t make it perfect as this is just a demonstration video rather than a full production, so I wasn’t too worried about the slight jitter.
Using this method for filming nighttime scenes has some major pros as opposed to filming during the night. When filming during the night in low light situations you have less light reaching the sensor on your camera resulting in lower quality images and trying to increase your iso to boost the light is only going to add digital gain which is not appealing. Filming during the day outdoors there wasn’t a need for additional lighting especially if it’s fully dark out getting lights bright enough and to cover enough area can be extremely expensive and time-consuming to get set up.
Using this method a lot of time was saved not having to get the additional lighting as well as money if there was a budget involved, although there are two cons I have noticed with my method although they really only applied to my specific situation. The first being the sky, overcast days work best for this keeping the sky a neutral colour it's possible you would be able to separately mask it and grade it differently but doing this would be very time-consuming. The other con I have found was specific to the location we used being a University campus during the day time it was difficult to get opportunities to film when no one is around as we didn’t want pedestrians in this scene as in the original there were not. If this was shot at night pedestrians wouldn’t have been an issue.
My Conclusion
In the end, I was quite happy with this result over my first. I used the knowledge I had gained since then and applied it to my current work. In my opinion, this technique for filming nighttime scenes, especially as a student who works with €0 budget and has a tight shooting schedule's this method stands out superior to me as opposed to filming at night using lights. I still have more to learn and improve my technique that I’m developing especially when it comes to the sky but I do plan on implementing it into future projects and films and experimenting with ways to improve. To others, I would also like to highly recommend trying out this technique, especially to those with cameras that don’t have the best low-light performance.
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