Night Shooting

As our film Suicide Squad will be shot mostly at night, we've been wondering the same thing ...

Question

I would like to know your procedure when facing a night exterior: what do you use to (if you do) justify the sources? What gear and angles do you prefer? What gels are your favorites for moonlight and no-light? How do you match the exposure between close up's and open shots.?

I've found myself lately solving all these situations with the same old style moonlight with high soft sources, with CTB's or Moonlights, some fog... and I'm getting a bit bored with using always the same scheme. I'll be shooting a short soon and I'll be in the middle of a deep forest, no moonlight, no houses near, no light at all to justify sources, so, I'm a bit clueless with how to achieve good results.

Answer from Oliver Stapleton at IMDB's Ask-A-Filmmaker

The man-in-a-coffin is always a problem and completely undoes the whole notion of source lighting. I have never had to shoot someone in a closed coffin but if I did I think I would approach it as a non-source very dark overall ambient light. This would be achieved by creating a soft overall light (which might involve some cheating by taking bits off the coffin), underexposing it and printing it dark, and probably cool in tone or blueish depending on the context.

I did a big forest job for A Midsummer Night's Dream but that was comedy/fantasy so it was appropriate to light it with magical light, which was chiefly in the form of direct light punching in beams through the trees.

The trouble with a forest if you opt for no moonlight is that trees and particularly leaves have a tendency to go very dark. It is a situation in which your eye can really fool you into thinking it is much brighter than it is. Trust the spotmeter in this situation: if it says “E” then increase the light level! Balloons can be very handy in the forest as long as there is enough space in the canopy. You have to be really careful in accepting forest locations otherwise you can get into big trouble with the lighting. A road nearby is almost essential for a crane to provide beams (with fog if that is what you want) and if you are not after the beamy look, then you need enough space to float balloons out of the top of frame without them overlighting whatever they are closest to.

I think your boredom may stem from the idea of the blueish back ¾ light on a crane which is employed so often. I hardly ever use this in cities as I think it looks so unrealistic. I go for sources such as street lights, buildings etc. When you are in the desert or the country then you can always go for a dark soft look (used very effectively in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon). An effective way of doing this is to light soft put “print” hard either through a DI process or through bleach by-pass.

Colour choices are very personal: adding some green is sometimes effective, going very blue tends to be more of a TV look so I would opt for “grey” but it’s very much a matter of context.

The convention for very dark is that you need something bright, even very small, to make the dark look dark. This is true in some ways as the screen often looks “milky” if there is absolutely nothing on it that is above midtone. But this is just a starting point: the main thing is to do what interests you and get a result that you and the Director like.