Day for Night: How to Make Daytime Shots look like Nighttime

Shooting what is commonly known in the industry as “day for night” has been a trick used for decades. The method involves shooting in the daytime under sunlight. Then the task is to make it look as close to possible as nighttime using various techniques.

Even if you’ve never heard of it before, you will almost certainly have seen it used, in TV shows and film. Day for Night was used so often by Hollywood, especially in lower budget movies and westerns that it became known in France as “nuit américaine” (“American night”).

This technique often has variable results. Sometimes the effect looks no more convincing than daytime but with the exposure reduced.

One telltale sign a scene has been filmed using “day for night” is when everything is dark except the sky. See what I mean in the image above taken from a John Wayne western. Below I really quickly (and badly) replaced the sky with a night sky using photoshop.

Simply by replacing the sky, the illusion of night is much stronger. Replacing the sky in the 1950s and 60s was a lot harder than it is now, with digital editing techniques affordable to many.

Creating the illusion

Filmmaking is all about creating the illusion of reality. This doesn’t necessarily mean recreating reality. In fact it means creating a kind of poetic impression of reality.

If you’ve ever witnessed a real fistfight, you will know human fists hitting human chins don’t make the exaggerated sound we hear in movies. Rather, filmmakers attempt to recreate something which “feels” real to the audience. And the same applies to trying to make day look like night.

I had to shoot a day for night scene in my feature film Third Contact. While I managed to underexpose the shot enough to make the actors look like they might just be outside at night, the sky came out almost bright white by contrast.

To try to reduce that effect, we shot during twilight (the moment just after the sun has dipped behind the horizon). But as soon as the sky came into shot, it was obvious is was day.

So when I shot the scene, I tried to keep the sky out of shot. We were in a park surrounded by trees, so angles filled with trees in the background were set up. I also took some higher shots, angled down so that the sky was just above the top of the frame.

What does night look like?

While we can’t (and probably don’t want to) replicate how our eyes experience night, we can get inspiration from reality. A lot will depend on the scene and the lighting. If there’s artificial light like flashlights or streetlights, that is going to change how things look.

But if we are trying to recreate simple ambient light, from stars, moon or distance light sources then we might look at these elements:

deeper shadows – bigger and with less detail

reduce the size and brightness of the highlights

reduce warm colours (red) and boost cold (blue)

higher or lower contrast?

Shooting for Day for Night

These are the camera settings you can adjust when shooting day for night. Getting the image closer in camera gives you a bit of a head start. The less you have to cheat things in the grade the better.

Underexpose

Make sure to shoot your scene with the camera set to underexpose the image. This means highlights won’t be blown out. So work out how to film with the exposure under what would be acceptable if you wanted it to look like day.

Depending on your camera, you might need to use ND filters. This is to reduce the light reaching the sensor without having to increase shutter speed above the “film look” setting. For example: 24 fps and 1/48th shutter speed.

Don’t go too far and remove too much information from the image. You just want to make sure the highlights are not clipping or burning out.

More blue

Using your white balance settings, try to give your image a look which is more blue than would be for a daylight scene.

Backlight your subjects

When you are shooting in broad daylight, the actors will have hard shadows on their faces. This is another giveaway clue when watching scenes shot day for night.

Go out with a friend under a moonlit sky and see how brightly lit their face is. You’ll see that moonlight creates a gentle, soft light. This is like the difference between having the overhead lights on in a room or using a couple of candles.

This is a good point, because it reminds us filmmaking is all about creating a feeling. Moonlight and candlelight are both considered essential for a romantic scene. But full midday sunlight doesn’t feel as romantic.

So, one option is to position your actors with their backs to the sun to soften the light on their faces. You aim is to create a nice “rim light” on the actors, which will be easier adjust to look like moonlight when grading.

Shoot during golden hour

As mentioned above, shooting at twilight provides a softer light which is closer to moonlight. In fact, it’s literally closer to night as well as in lighting terms.

Typically, grading twilight to look like night is much simpler than doing so with full daylight footage. However, you will still need to work around framing – a lower sun is more likely to appear in shot. Also, a lower sun will create longer shadows which you might not want for creative reasons.

Use a polarizer

By using a polarizer you can cut out those reflective glares which give you away. A polarizer will give you more control over the harsh appearance of the daylight. The filter also reduces the amount of light too, which helps you to (slightly) underexpose the image.

Grading Day for Night

Shooting day for night is only half the task. Luckily, these days we have the power of digital grading software to help us do an even better job turning day into night.

Remember, film is 1) creative and poetic – this isn’t about reality, but the impression of reality to convey a feeling to the audience. And 2) an illusion – they say the aim of a filmmaker is to get the audience to “suspend their disbelief”. This is not the same as believing what they are seeing is reality.

You are aim is to seduce your audience into accepting your film’s version of reality. So anything which pulls them out of this seduction is to be avoided. That’s why consistency is so important.

Once you have established the look (ie: the rules of this world) try to maintain it throughout the entire night scene. If in one shot the actors have nice soft lighting, then in the next there’s harsher more daylight like lighting, it will jar the audience out of the scene. They’ll then start to question reality – “hey, this is day for night!”

Adjust exposure

You can adjust the exposure still further, bringing down the highlights. Now, how much detail do you want to retain in the faces of the actors? Do you want silhouettes, near silhouettes or just general soft light across their faces?

When you reduce highlights yo start to lose detail. However, you can counter this by raising the mid tones. If your image is now too flat, crush the backs to bring back contrast.

Adjust colour and saturation

Generally speaking, this involves pushing blue/magenta into the highlights and the shadows. Next, desaturate the entire image. Cool tones should work well with the slightly underexposed footage and start to generate that convincing day for night look.

Contrast

Reducing contrast gives you a smoother more moonlight-like look. However it can also make the image look flat and grey – not very romantic!

That’s why some subtle but brighter light catching the edges of faces can create something more visible, more contrasty, but at the same time give a feeling of night.

This will all depend on what you are trying to achieve and what you managed to film. If you managed to film with some back lighting, then this might help you out at this stage.

Replace the sky

These days, software such as Adobe After Effects allows us to do simple compositing relatively easy. This means, unlike those 1960s b movie westerns, we can try to replace the sky. This will be much easier if your camera isn’t moving (or just slowly and smoothly).

This YouTube tutorial by Tom Antos walks you through his whole day for night procedure, include sky replacement.

I think I would go for deeper shadows if you truly want the shot to look like night. Yes you lose a lot of detail from the image, but that’s what night looks like to the human eye. We simply not very good at seeing in the dark.

The problem with the scene in this tutorial is the desert background looks generally quite bright. To look more like night, that sand would be better appearing mostly black. Perhaps a few subtle highlights picking out some edges here and there.

What are your thoughts?

What are the best night scenes you’ve seen in a movie? I would definitely recommend getting inspiration from those, even if they’re not day for night.

I think it’s a very tricky thing to get right. I often see movies where I think, “Where’s all that light coming from? Is that supposed to be moonlight?”

So, even shooting at night with a full crew and lights filmmakers are still faking it. When moonlight is replaced by big powerful lights it doesn’t look realistic. But there’s a reason for doing this and that’s because filmmakers have to think about their audience.

The truth is, for commercial purposes, filmmakers might need to over-light a night scene. It might just be budget and a risk reduction attitude (better we see more than less). Or it might be a lack of top cinematography skills.

For me, the most important thing is the correct mood and feeling is created. This is not reality, this is movie reality. But we also want to avoid snapping people out of the movie. And that happens when it’s glaringly obvious that a night scene is not shot at night.

Take a look at this image below from the film Fright Night (2011). This is not day for night, but it’s a good example of a scene shot at night and having to “cheat” certain things.

To me, having a dark background goes a long way to creating the illusion of night. The bright headlamp contrast with the surrounding background making it look darker.

Meanwhile, the actors are well lit in the foreground without harsh shadows. This is not how this would look in reality. Their faces are far to well lit.

And where is that light on the actors coming from in the scene? Well, being logical, only from a perfectly set up film light. There is no source in the scene for that light.

So this is a good example of how filmmakers are operating between real and realistic. The director and DoP have decided to abandon reality here and light the actors so the audience can clearly see their expressions. But they’ve done it in a way which probably won’t take the audience out of the scene.

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