*shaking movie directors by the shoulders* NIGHTTIME AND OTHER FORMS OF ENVIRONMENTAL DARKNESS CAN BE IMPLIED WITHOUT MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE TO SEE THE FUCKING MOVIE
I always think of that conversation on the set of lotr where the cinematographer was asked where all the light was supposed to be coming from in scenes like the battle of helms deep, and he just responded that it comes from the same place as the soundtrack does. sometimes you need to be a little unrealistic to make your work better and actually watchable
This, incidentally, is why “NOPE” had such spectacular and clear night scenes: master cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema just plain didn’t shoot at night.
Instead, they strapped a regular camera and an infrared camera together, coordinated them with lasers…
…combined them, used the naturally black sky created by the infrared as a blank canvas, added a new digital cloud line and various other effects to create a gorgeously lit night scene.
This is a ground-breaking new technique, and Jordan Peele is correct to say it could make movies better.
Good night footage is possible.
You just have to shoot it during the day.
I’d disagree slightly by saying good night footage is possible, but I feel like it has more to do with the intention behind how it’s done rather than just shooting during the day. Day-for-night shooting is done all the time, the issue is it’s often dimmed wayyyy down so it looks “dark” and loses so much of its colour and detail. House of the Dragon, for example, shot night scenes in the day that ended up barely legible:
The reason Nope and other movies with beautiful day-for-night like Mad Max: Fury Road look so good is because the filmmakers shot the night scenes during the day with deliberate intention and a vision of how they wanted the eventual night to look and how that would serve the film.
Fury Road’s night scenes feel like they belong to another reality, less like night and more like the movie has suddenly entered The Blue Dimension, which I didn’t like when I saw it initially but now I feel like it lends the scenes a surreal quality that really works, plus everything is totally readable. The cinematography and colour all through Fury Road create a sense of heightened reality beyond our normal senses, so the bright saturated blue night fits right in.
Nope, on the other hand, is probably the closest thing I’ve seen to capturing what it feels like to be outside in the country on a bright night. It’s brighter than most nights really are so that it’s readable, but the way the filmmakers edited the daytime footage and the addition of the infrared camera create the right kind of look to recreate how it feels once your eyes adjust to the dark.
Even though they’re both very different, I’d say they both work because the way the daytime footage was adjusted to night with deliberate intent to create an effect that would work for their respective films.
The scenes from Nope and Fury Road work because they forsake realism for intentional stylization. Neither of them are ‘realistic’. Both of them have, if you know how to look, very obvious light sources that ‘real’ night doesn’t have. (But so does every shot in a film that has good craft.). They’re very clearly day-for-night, but you buy it as night because they’re consistent lighting designs that carry over from the rest of the film.
amhrancas 