Lower your f-stop.

The f-stop is, by the most basic of definitions, a measurement for how much light is being let through your lens aperture. The lower the f-stop, the larger the opening, the more light reaching your sensor (or film). When you play around with the f-stop, you’ll notice that when you are shooting “wide open” – which is to say with the lowest f-stop possible – your focus will become very shallow. This means you can get a nice, blurry background or focus on very specific things in your frame, but it also means that if your subject is moving, it will be very hard to keep focus.

Set your shutter speed accordingly.

This one is a bit tricky. While a longer (slower) shutter speed allows more light to reach your sensor, it does not necessarily result in a clearer image. With a longer shutter speed your images are more likely to blur, especially if there’s any movement at all. As a rule of thumb, to prevent motion-blur when filming, set your shutter speed to double that of your shooting frame rate. So, if you’re shooting at 24fps, the ideal shutter speed will be 1/48 (or 1/50, if 1/48 is not an option). Only make adjustments if absolutely necessary.

Increase your ISO.

Assuming you are shooting on a digital camera, increasing the ISO is the easiest way to lighten up your image. You’ll see it instantly in your viewfinder and the changes can be dramatic. The higher the ISO, the brighter the image. But be careful. Higher ISO will increase the risk of getting a grainy image, potentially ruining the footage. On full-frame cameras you can generally increase the ISO to about 3200, while a crop-sensor camera will be more likely to give you grainy images at around 1600, so increase the ISO with care and be sure to adjust the f-stop and ISO together for the best settings and the clearest image. And though you shouldn’t rely on it too heavily, remember that tweaks can be made in post, by adjusting exposure or brightness.

Control your surroundings.

Since it’s much harder to get good, clear images in low-light situations, do what you can to make things easier for yourself. Stabilize your camera – or have less movement in your shots. Be closer to your subject, so it’s easier to keep focus with a low f-stop. Use a grab-n-go light source, if possible. And keep your camera in manual mode, so you – not your camera – decides which of the above parameters to prioritize in order to get you the best footage possible.

h/t borrowlenses.com for their insight

Now, when you’re shooting for editing, you can do so to various degrees. A prime example that’s often brought up when shooting for editing is mentioned, is Robert Rodriguez’ El Mariachi. Hear the director explain how he planned his shots with the final edit in mind.

This is obviously taking it to the extremes. With digital cameras, laptop workstations and powerful editing software, your options are plentiful, even on a budget. So let’s take a look at how director and co-writer of The Storyteller, Joe Crump, approached the shoot – knowing that he would also be editing the footage. Here’s our conversation.

Why did you decide to edit the film yourself? Pros and cons to this approach?

 

In filmmaking, the story is told three times, 1. by the screenwriters, 2. by the director and 3. by the editors. I wanted to be involved in all three parts of this process. I also love to edit and my co-editor was my daughter, Katie Crump – who sat by my side and helped me craft the story.

 

So the pros of doing it myself is that it’s a hell of a lot of fun and I got to spend a lot of time with Katie. I also had help syncing the dailies from Nick Andrews, Saxony Wynecoop and Emelie Flower… which made our job a lot easier since they had to be done manually.

 

The cons – I couldn’t blame anyone else for my mistakes as a director or not getting coverage. I was told by several people that I should let someone else edit it – that I was too close to it – and I suppose that may turn out to be the case, but I don’t think it has. In fact, I think being close to it might have helped.

 

Knowing you would be editing yourself, how did you plan ahead? Did you organize the footage in a certain way?

 

We had a wonderful script supervisor, Michael Blomquist. He kept amazing notes and handed us a very detailed log when all was said and done. We also had a sound log that was very helpful from our sound mixer Bud Osborne. We kept all the camera file names so it was easy to cross reference.

 

After that, we kept track of everything by the day we shot it. We then created sequences that were about 5 minutes in length – we’d break them up by shot.

 

We then nested each of these sequences into one long master sequence. Using nested sequences speeds everything up and makes it much easier to find the shots you are looking for on your timeline.

 

We used an Alexa Mini and our camera original files were ProRes 4444, which won’t play on a PC – so we ended up making proxies to edit picture. While we were editing, (we used Premiere Pro CC), Adobe upgraded Premiere and now we can play the camera original on the PC – we still can’t open those files on a PC in Quicktime without hacking the metadata – and that caused the software to crash… you gotta love Apple and their proprietary codec.

Did the fact that you knew how you would be editing the film inspire any of your choices while shooting? Shot compositions? Long takes vs short takes? Blocking and actions?

 

Yes, absolutely. I spent a lot of time creating a shot list before I started directing. This is my first narrative feature film, so I had a good deal of fear and trepidation going into it – thinking that somehow, when I got on the set, everything would go to hell and I’d forget all the important things I needed to include or watch out for in the film. My shot list was 100 pages of notes, 100 pages of location pictures and diagrams and 90 pages of script. I broke up my shotlist into binders that we broke up by location. That way I wouldn’t have to carry all 300 pages, just the pages I needed for that particular location. Yes, this was probably overkill, but it makes things a lot more relaxing when you are prepared and it made it possible for me to work with my Director of Photography, Dan Clarke to come up with some additional shots that were better than I had planned on my own. As the shoot went on, my expectations of what our shots should look like and do got higher and higher. I didn’t just want to tell the story, I wanted to do it elegantly – and sometimes, you have to be there on the set to see something, an angle, a space, a camera move, the right angle of daylight… and take advantage of it when it appears. This takes a calm set and an fully engaged crew.

 

I was expecting to have a lot more emergencies than we ended up having. I was fortunate to have a great production team keeping things moving, headed up by our Producer, Rachel Noll.

 

We have a lot of live music in the movie, but we don’t just stay on people singing, we tell the story while the music is being played – so Rachel Noll (co-writer) and I designed a lot of the montage sequences around these songs. We freely played with time, location, memory – all that stuff during the songs. We also had to estimate how long it would take for certain images and sequences to play – how much screen time they would take – and I designed the shots so that we only had to shoot the parts of the song that we would actually show. I would like to have had more time to shoot more coverage, but it all ended up working pretty well when we got into the cut.

 

How did the intended use of visual effects in certain scenes affect how they were shot – and how does this play into how you are now editing those scenes?

 

We tried to use practical effects whenever we could. Dan put an LED light on the end of a wand and we floated it into the scene for the fairy effect. Some of the shots we don’t have that effect and you can tell because the light being cast from the LED gives a wonderful look on any object or person near the fairy – when we didn’t use it (usually because of time constraints), we had to fake the glow on their faces in After Effects. That worked too, but it was time consuming in post and never looked quite as nice.

 

We also shot a lot of Day for Night. Our main actor was a 10 year old girl (Brooklyn Rae Silzer) and because we shot under SAG Ultra Low Budget rules, we had to limit the times and hours we could use her. Most of the work we did in the woods was day for night – same with the work we did outside on the Fairy Bridge. Dan Clarke, our DP, also did most of the VFX work on the film… some of the effects have 35 or 40 layers in 3D space.

35-40 layers of effects in 3D space is a far cry from the simplicity of the shots described by Robert Rodriguez in the video at the top, but both approaches share a common goal: Making the best film you can with the means available to you.

For more on shooting day-for-night, check out our article on the subject here. And if you would like to take a peek behind the scenes of The Storyteller and see how some of the VFX shots were created, here’s a video of an early visual FX test.

If you have never heard the term ‘Day For Night’ before, here’s an ultra-quick primer. One of the main luxuries afforded to you as a filmmaker when shooting during the daytime, the sun, literally disappears come nighttime, so shooting good-looking, non-grainy footage will suddenly require massive lighting setups to cast just enough light on your subjects and backgrounds to make them stand out clearly on camera without making it look like the scene has been lit at all. This is because cameras generally can’t shoot in the dark. What your eyes see at night is not what the camera is going to pick up – hence the unnatural lighting needed. To cut costs (and for many other reasons, like scheduling, location/talent availability, safety, etc.) filmmakers throughout the ages have resorted to the ‘Day For Night’ technique, wherein you shoot your nighttime scenes during the day while taking certain measures that will enable you to pass the footage off as genuine nighttime shots. Some is done in-camera, some is done in post.

Many articles have been written about how to achieve a good ‘Day For Night’ shot. Most focus on a few key parameters, such as avoiding harsh shadows, lowering your exposure, avoiding showing the sky in your shot, using polarizing filters and taking your sweet time in post-production. All valid points, but since you’ll find more than a handful good articles on these subjects elsewhere, we’ll gloss over them without going into too much detail. Instead, we’ll focus on a more mental aspect of the ‘Day For Night’ effect.

First, the classics:

#1 Avoid harsh shadows

To avoid hard shadows in your shot, which is a dead give-away that your scene was shot during the day, be sure to backlight your subjects and try, if you can, to shoot on cloudy days or in the shade. Moonlight casts some light, so it’s not necessary to avoid shadows all-together, but aim for a soft glow around your subject, rather than a long shadow on the ground behind it. Here’s a more in-depth look at different challenges with different, natural light conditions.

#2 Lower your exposure

There’s less light available to you (whether your camera or your eyes) during the night, so have your camera help you a bit on the way to achieving the ‘Day For Night’ effect by lowering your exposure. You definitely don’t want anything in your shot to be blown out or super bright, and you also don’t want to lose too much detail, so manually adjust your exposure to be just a little lower than you normally would have it. The rest you can take care of in post.

#3 Avoid the sky

If you don’t know anything about color-grading, using masks or key frames, you may want to completely avoid shooting the sky. A bright sky in your nighttime shot screams DAYTIME and there goes the suspension of disbelief out the window. That said, a night sky can be eerie or beautiful or set up your shot perfectly, so if you know how to effectively edit the sky in post, go ahead and shoot it. Just keep in mind that in moving shots or action with the sky as a backdrop is going to require a lot of careful editing later. If you can achieve the same results for your scene without having the sky in the shot, you’ll be off much easier.

#4 Use a polarizing filter

Think of the polarizer as a safety net. If you have to shoot against a surface with a glare, such as a body of water or a shiny building, the polarizer will help you avoid anything too shiny to remove in post. You can even leave it on your lense for the duration of the (‘Day For Night’) shoot and not even think twice about it. It’s not going to hurt your shots and it will help if you miss accounting for a shiny surface in your shot setup.

#5 Take your sweet time in post-production

Carefully adjusting your hue, saturation, colors, exposure and shadows will get you far, but it will be your attention to detail that will really sell the shot. Adding artificial light sources, like headlights, streetlights, the glow from a window, the speckle of lights from the windows in a high rise, and so on and so forth, will create the nighttime setting – more than turning of the blue’s and turning down the red’s will ever do. Post-production is where the technical magic is going to happen when you’re shooting ‘Day For Night’, so take your time.

More on the post-production process can be found in this tutorial by Video Copilot.

Which brings us to the point I really want to make:

#6 Tell the story right

As a filmmaker you’re first and foremost a storyteller, so don’t get hung up on technicalities like polarizers or blue hues in post, just to then forget about your most powerful tool of all: the power of suggestion. This is what will take your shot over the finish line. Let’s look at a couple of examples. Say your character is driving all night to meet his lover on a dock four hundred miles away, so they can skip off to a tropical island together. What will make the scene feel like night may be the quiet music on the radio, the coffee he’s drinking to stay awake and the empty road. Or say your character is running through the woods to escape a cloaked villain. Quick cuts to other creatures of the night, being disturbed by the chase, may sell the fact that it’s night: an owl, a critter, a fox, a couple of eyes caught in the glare of a flashlight. Or say you’re shooting an action movie – nothing says night more than night vision.

All this to say that you have more in your tool box than filters and color-grading. Use the power of story to help people believe that it’s nighttime.

Need a good example of a movie that primarily shot ‘Day For Night’ scenes? Check out ’28 Weeks Later’ – because one of the film’s lead actors was too young to legally shoot through the night, most of his scenes were shot ‘Day For Night.’ And it looks perfect.