Make yourself a cup of coffee, whip out a notepad, sit up straight and listen carefully. Enjoy.

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.

#1 Every Frame A Painting

My personal favorite. Every Frame A Painting is like the class you wish you had in film school. It’s a triumphantly unpredictable  bastard of a film analysis class and the rantings of your favorite, passionate teacher. By analyzing certain scenes, director trademarks, genre-specific filmmaking tools or something else you would have never thought to analyze, host Tony Zhou and his expertly edited videos will leave you not only smarter, but inspired and amazed.

#2 Film Riot

Fast-talking host, independent filmmaker and DIY handy-man Ryan Connolly and his rag-tag team of film aficionados deliver tutorials, DIY builds, real-life examples and How-To’s on just about everything you could ever think of related to filmmaking. The beauty of this channel is not so much the hyper-active presentation (though that’ll certainly keep you focused), as it is the way in which these guys manage to take the mystery out of Hollywood filmmaking, while preserving all the magic. Specifically targeting independent, DIY or super low-budget filmmakers, the channel abounds with videos on how to make your film look and sound like a million $ without breaking the bank.

#3 Filmmaker IQ

With a somewhat more technical and perhaps film school-like approach, Filmmaker IQ is an immensely valuable resource. Think of it as a ‘How Stuff Works’ for filmmakers; some topics are highly technical, borderline scientific, while other topics are pure entertainment. Wanna know how a camera sensor works? No problem. Wanna brush up on the origins of auteur theory? Why not. Wanna learn how to light a film noir? You should. And all of that can be done in the same place. Filmmaker IQ.

#4 Indy Mogul

With roughly 1250 videos on their channel, Indy Mogul is almost like a Discovery Channel of the Internet. Before Discovery Channel became all about reality TV, of course. Indy Mogul is an impressive library of engaging video tutorials, hands-on reviews of cameras and equipment, Q&A’s with filmmakers and a whole lot of tips and tricks to up your indy filmmaking game. Now, Indy Mogul hasn’t been active in years, so don’t expect new videos about the latest in gear or software. But do expect to get lost in a massive library of goodies that are equally helpful today as they were 6 years ago.

#5 Now You See It

Similar in style to Every Frame A Painting, Now You See It is sort of a hybrid between film analysis and geeky musings on what makes movies great. Though not always entirely on point, mostly the videos from Now You See It will give you lots of a ha! moments and insightful takes on movies, scenes or techniques you already thought you knew everything about.

For your inspirational pleasure, here is a ‘Best Of’ list from Vimeo, highlighting ten extraordinary videos with just the one thing in common that they were all at one point granted that coveted little badge; Vimeo Staff Pick. The Vimeo Staff Pick tradition is just days away from reaching a major milestone in having hand-picked 10.000 videos from the many more that are created and uploaded every single day.

So please. Be inspired. Borrow ideas. And visit Vimeo for the story behind each of these fantastic videos.

h/t Vimeo

The following is an opinion piece by guest blogger Federico Ponce – whom you’ve hopefully already been acquainted with through our series of video interviews with him. If not, go check them out. Fede is a freelance MoGraph and Visual FX artist, has worked as creative director on several Marvel project (like Iron Man, Avengers and Thor) and is currently working on his own project, Sebastian: The Slumberland Odyssey.

When I learned to ride my bike. I fell down chipped a tooth. But my parents did not take the bike away, they encouraged me to keep trying. I eventually learned and years later, I even won a few races.

By now you have probably read all about how The Fantastic Four movie tanked and how terrible it is. You’ve probably heard rumors or speculation that Josh Trank’s career is done. Throughout the commotion you have probably caught a glimpse of the director’s frustration on twitter. But through all the vitriol and unabashed passion, let’s take a breather and try to see what is going on. Because this kind of unrestrained response to a film doesn’t sit right, it goes beyond fandom, it goes beyond civil disagreement, hell it goes beyond entertainment.

Josh Trank had made a terrific film called chronicle. He brought a high concept to an established super hero genre and created relatable characters. He showed prowess and great aesthetic when dealing with visual effects. He told the story he wanted and he did so while being vigilant of a budget but most importantly, he created a world, an original intellectual property that found its ground with the younger millennials. This new film was well received with audiences and critics alike.

So far are you with me? Does Trank seem like an outlandish choice for a superhero movie directed at teens and young adults? Maybe it wasn’t the craziest of choices given that, even though he had not done a massive tent pole franchise before, plenty of  first time directors had already proven that they could transition into bigger films.  With all the rumored shortcomings, the least divergent component of this dysfunctional tetrad is Trank.

THE OTHER COMPONENT: The critics. They are “just” doing their job and we all know what that means, they get paid to dissect movies not to enjoy them and that is fine, it serves a purpose and even at that, it’s not even an objective way to measure art (yes, art).  Then we come to the bloggers. These writers are a diverse group.  Most of them are passionate journalists looking for a good story and some of them are ardent cinephiles. The majority write with their hearts and look for a way to connect. They are the bridge.

Unfortunately a small chunk of them can be signed off as digital parrots, repeating whatever will give them those oh so desired clicks, with no sense of emotional restraint or intellectual analysis or even the minimal moderation and self-censoring needed to check for facts before publishing something. They rather shoot first, damage and then apologize and re-edit. As if “undo” on their computers could be applied to a person’s career. But who cares about the life’s work of an artist, when there is a keyboard and a screen between the blogger and real life.

Some “Authors” even go as far as pandering to the big studios in order to get that exclusive. It didn’t use to be this way, the blogs used to be the last bastion of diversity in opinion left on the ever commercialized and capitalized internet. But the real crux of this article is not that diverse group of bloggers, it’s the homogenized loud part of the audience. You know which one, the one that can’t stand people eating popcorn next to them because the sound distracts them from looking at the black widow’s ass.  This particular brand of beloved moviegoer has transformed from a loving fan into a horrible demanding, tantrum throwing quasi adult bent on destroying anything that does not conform to its unrealized prepubescent desires. I could write six tomes of Jungian psychology trying to define what sort of reticent feelings lay dormant on these creatures but I will spare you the horror and just bare naked the fact that perhaps most of their unrealized dreams are projected on to the comic books and movies that feed their imagination, hence acquiring paramount value in their wellbeing.  But what’s the relationship between the fandom and the film industry?

Well, the fandom holds the key. They are the consumers of the product and therein lies the entire calamity of the matter. As consumers they have been programmed to think that everything that they spend their money on is a product they can consume and discard. They have no regard for the life of the product or even its origin. Their prime objective is to satisfy their immediate desire and when that is done they move on the next, and then the next and then more. Every time their desire grows so does their lust for something bigger, sweeter, more explosions, more characters, more vfx, more story, more more, more… you get the point. When their desires and expectations are not met, they destroy. They tear apart. There is no room for reining in emotion, the world becomes either incredible or horrible. The view of absolutes take over and the consumer continues on its quest for more. If I remember correctly only the Sith see things in absolutes.

But what would happen to the entire film industry if instead of an audience of consumers, we had PATRONS. Like the ancient patrons of the Greek or Roman arts. Supporters of a craft that takes time and patience to develop. Film making is a craft that can become an art. It is one of the most complex forms of art present today and there is no reason why art and entertainment cannot be one and the same. Filmmaking is the incredible culmination of a choreographed dance between hundreds of people. It is the live example of what happens when people unite under a dream and follow their passion in order to bring that dream to fruition. Of course there is the studio side of it and the strategy and positioning, budges and the less romantic part of filmmaking but nevertheless it remains an art. To make films is to move mountains.

If the audience steps up to the plate and evolves enough to become a modern day patron it will be rewarded handsomely for it. It will not just be a passive player in the film making process. It can find a way to realize its creative potential by supporting authors and directors and having the pleasure of seeing them grow. There is no greater feeling than losing one’s self in a larger meaningful moment and what an incredible feeling it could be if the audience believed in their artists and supported them through the hard times. Maybe then the creative people wanting to make movies would not have to trade their souls to the devilish corporations and have their entire reputation rest on the fragile decisions of suits and fat cats whose only purpose is maximizing profit.

When I learned to ride my bike. I fell down and chipped a tooth and cried. But my parents did not take the bike away, they encouraged me.  So I invite the audience to give Josh Trank and any other Director who is trying to do something new and something cool another chance. I invite the audience to abandon the way of consumption and take upon the road of creators. Become Patrons of the arts and support the artists that are trying to make this place a bit more fun. Some have already taken up the journey as crowdfunders and some have ventured into creating their own projects. You don’t have to do either of these, you can just start by regulating your response to something with mild dislike or abnegation rather than full on hate.

I have personally crowdfunded a few projects and for a brief moment I felt part of something bigger than I. To see the projects come to life…well that was much better feeling than tearing down someone else’s career.

You know what the core theme of the Fanatstic Four is about? We are stronger together.  #GotrankGo

Fede Ponce has been in the entertainment industry for more than 15 years and he is humbled by having had the lucky opportunity to work on some of the biggest blockbusters to date.  Whether leading global campaigns of MAIN TITLES for MARVEL movies as Creative Director (Iron Man, Thor, Avengers) or creating a metal suit for Iron Man as a VFX supervisor, he has found himself working with some of the most creative people in entertainment. He has directed commercials and video game cinematics. However, he always dreamed of developing his own project. He received the help of Bertha Navarro, producer for Guillermo Del Toro, and has worked closely with Academy Award winning writer Zachary Sklar to ensure his project, Sebastian: The Slumberland Odyssey, is founded on an incredibly solid story.

I was fortunate enough to have an experience a few weeks ago shooting a complex and involved action scene for a film. I was kidnapped and pulled out of a building after a massive explosion, I got to kick some ass, run and dive, steal a van and peal out of a parking lot, get shot, inject a man with a syringe, and watch a man fall down a flight of stairs. This was the first time I had been a part of a shoot like this, and not only was it a blast, but it was done on a very low budget. Here’s how it was all done.

Explosions!

First of all, lets talk about on screen explosions. Or at least the one I witnessed. The scene called for a building exploding. Windows broke, the door busts open, and a group of scientists are pulled out of the rubble.

I watched the pyro team set up a big air machine in the doorway of a building façade on New York Street in the Manhattan Beach Studio lot. They filled it with a grey powder. When the director called ACTION they pressed a button and the air machine fired off a loud noise accompanied by a cloud of dust and debris shot out of the machine. The building itself remained unharmed.

Glass fell out of a window onto one of the actors as the explosion happened – this was achieved by a bucket of candy glass, which is small squares of rubber made to look like shattered glass, poured from above and thrown over the actors on the street below. The effect is surprisingly realistic, and avoids any harm coming to the actors, or having to worry about shards of glass for the rest of the day.

Fighting and falling!

The next sequence involved a team of assassins pulling me and another doctor through the smoke and out into the street. The smoke from the initial explosion had cleared as they set up this new shot, so in place of the grey dust from the explosion effect, they now set up a smoke machine in the doorway to mimic the previous shot. When all of the actors were set in the awning, they filled the doorway with smoke from a small smoke machine. When the director called action, I was pulled down the stairs by an assassin holding my arm. He had a gun to my ribs. I was grateful he was there with me, because I couldn’t see the steps to save my life, and without him to lean on and guide me down the stairs I probably would have fallen.

The stunt performer was wearing pads underneath his costume that were so thin they couldn’t be seen. Before we did the first take, the Stunt coordinator came to speak to us and talk us through the stunt that would happen after we got down the stairs. Basically, we would tussle a bit, and I break away and elbow him in the face. The elbow to the face was actually an elbow to the air about a foot away from his face, but with the right angle and correct execution from me and him, it looked like I had clocked him pretty good. At the moment I broke away from his grasp, the director yells “BANG” and the stunt performer who had grabbed me reacts as though he got shot. He throws himself up into the air and falls into the stairs, rolling down three of them and landing on the concrete. It looked incredibly painful and real, but he got up and performed the same action four more times without injury or complaint.

Gunfire!

After he fell down the stairs, I grabbed a vile from his pocket and ran down the sidewalk as one of the other assassins fired a machine gun after me. Bullets ricocheting on the pavement next to my feet as I ran. This was achieved by the stunt coordinator standing just off camera with a pellet gun containing dirt pellets. As they hit the ground they would disintegrate into powder, giving the effect of bullets chipping at the pavement and the ground. Even if one of them had hit me, it wouldn’t have hurt.

At the end of my run down the pavement, I had to leap and dive underneath a tree as another man took a bullet aimed for me. There was a pad hidden beneath the tree off camera to catch my fall, and the stunt team talked me through the movements to make the fall both safe and realistic. We moved through this sequence several times to get different angles, and then it was time for the work with the van.

Stunt driving!

I was nervous going into this sequence, because I had never driven a van before, let alone driven it while doing a 7-page dialogue scene and being shot at. I had a stunt double on the set who, in wider shots, did all of the more extreme van work. She would do the fast driving and peeling out. She slammed on the breaks and skidded to a stop before rounding corners.

When it came time for me to get behind the wheel, they had rigged a big square light onto the windshield directly in front of my face to light me for the shot. This made it incredibly hard to see out the windshield. The first action was me jumping into the car, grabbing the keys, and peeling out as bullets batter the side of the van, and one of them hits me in the shoulder. I didn’t have to drive fast, but I had to do a lot of fast thinking, acting and reacting very quickly, while also trying to steer the cumbersome van through the narrow lot and around the corner.

The camera, for my coverage, was rigged to the driver’s side window, and the director was in the back of the van with a monitor. We drove laps around the lot, me quickly learning the route and getting more confident in my driving, though still nervous about the bright light shining in my eyes. The lines, with all this action going on, were falling right out of my head even though I had them completely memorized. Because we were on such a tight schedule, we didn’t have time to spend on getting me comfortable behind the wheel before we were shooting. We were losing daylight, and we just had to do the best we could with everything being thrown at us all at once.

Injections!

The final shot of this sequence involved an actor dying from a gun shot wound and me injecting him with a vile of liquid. Tubing was rigged underneath his shirt with fake blood that seeped out slowly as the scene went on, giving the illusion that he was losing a lot of blood. After we stopped the van, they reset the shot and I jumped in back. There were two syringes in my pocket. One, a real syringe that I had to stick into a vial of liquid and fill, and then a fake syringe with a needle that would push up into the syringe itself when pressed against the actors neck and look like it was going into his body without actually hurting him.

I had to fill the real syringe, and then set it off camera, grab the fake one, and jab it into the actor’s neck. Because they were identical, the actor being injected held the fake syringe for me, so once I had set down the real one, I could grab the fake one from him and both of us would know I had the right one.

As this was happening, the pyro team had rigged a strip of spark lights along the back wall of the van. In sequence, they went off one after the other creating noise and white sparks that looked like bullets hitting metal.

There were a lot of moving pieces involved in this 13-page sequence – and each one essential in pulling it off in a realistic way. The stunts and pyro effects were incredible to witness first hand, and getting to glimpse behind the smoke and mirrors of some of these common and impressive effects helped me to see that there are ways to accomplish realistic effects on a lower budget. Doing some stunts myself, and then seeing the more impressive stunts done by the others was humbling and exhilarating.

It really is magical to see how a sequence like this is shot. What we see up on the screen is one big magic show – we are fooled into believing that what we are seeing is real, and that is the beauty and the magic of filmmaking.

After eight years of late night nights and financial sacrifice, I share with you my personal project: Sebastian: the Slumberland Odyssey. It’s a first-of-its-kind, genre-busting series. It’s a mind bending live action/CGI episodic tale that blends Magical Realism with Science Fiction, in an unexplored new genre: SCI-FAN.

Logline: In a future ruled by AI, where disease is a choice and unauthorized dreaming is punishable by death, a young orphan risks his life by traveling into the Dreamworld in order to save his inexplicably ill grandfather.

An amazing journey you haven’t dreamed before

Thanks to an incredibly advanced A.I. humanity has been able to overcome war and poverty. Disease is now a choice. At last mankind has been united under a mission of collective prosperity. With one small price to pay: The loss of individuality.

In order for humankind to unite, people have forgone their ability to dream as well as their desire to be different. And with just cause, since unauthorized dreaming is now punishable by death.

However, there is another world beyond the reach of the A.I.: The Dreamverse – or as it is known in legend: Slumberland.  It is known as a realm made up of the entire collection of human dreams and desires. It is a vortex of chaos, fun and adventure where the remaining renegades and thought-provocateurs escape to in the middle of the night. Slumberland is a place of wonder where nothing is what it seems and the last remnants of human emotion remain pure and powerful.

There is a small house in the outskirts of the city, where the last unassimilated immigrants reside. Here two siblings thick as thieves and a few years apart, Sebastian and Mika, take turns assisting their mysteriously ill grandfather. The clock is ticking and danger looms near for neither sibling can stop themselves from dreaming. Now that the A.I. has taken note of the last dreamers, Mika inexplicably disappears leaving Sebastian and his grandfather alone. With his last breath grandpa has tasked young and fearful Sebastian to venture into the dreamworld in order to obtain a magical potion before his time runs out – or the A.I. finds him.

You can find out more about the story and the characters on the official Sebastian website here.

A story inspired by true events

The story of these two brothers and Sebastian’s journey through Slumberland was inspired by the relationship I have with my brother.  When I was young I left my hometown and came to California to develop my artistic skills. I used to visit my family often and in one of those trips, my father told me that I was going to have a baby brother. In order to make the most of the moments we spent together I created Slumberland. It’s a world in which anything could happen. It was a place that two brothers could visit together no matter how far away they were from each other.

You can find more about those stories and a recollection of my conversations, thoughts and feelings here and follow along on Facebook here.

About Federico Ponce:

Fede Ponce has been in the entertainment industry for more than 15 years and he is humbled by having had the lucky opportunity to work on some of the biggest blockbusters to date.  Whether leading global campaigns of MAIN TITLES for MARVEL movies as Creative Director (Iron Man, Thor, Avengers) or creating a metal suit for Iron Man as a VFX supervisor, he has found himself working with some of the most creative people in entertainment. He has directed commercials and video game cinematics. However, he always dreamed of developing his own project. He received the help of Bertha Navarro, producer for Guillermo Del Toro, and has worked closely with Academy Award winning writer Zachary Sklar to ensure his project, Sebastian: The Slumberland Odyssey, is founded on an incredibly solid story.

Chroma keying is a technique used to composite (layer) two images or video streams together based on color hues. Commonly referred to as green screen. Now, before you get excited about that fact that you can set up and implement the use of green screens on your own, adding a whole new dimension to your low-budget short film sci-fi vision, please hear our words of caution: Improper use of green screen will positively ruin your film. Use it sparingly – or get a professional involved – if this is a project you want to go places. But hey, if you’re just playing around, do just that. Play around. Have fun.

I found a helpful introductory video that explains how to get started with green screen. At about 7 minutes in it turns into a sales pitch, so go ahead and spend those last three minutes doing something else: