DAY for Night in Lazareth

Several scenes in the scrip took place at night in the woods. With the limited budget, I knew we didn’t have the means to properly light a vast swath of forest. The location was also very remote, so night shoots were avoided whenever possible. Which led me to consider Day for Night. I knew that the woods were quite dark during this time of year, which gave me a fighting chance to illuminate and counteract the daylight to create a dreamy, believable night effect but shoot during the day.

We used extremely bright flashlights and HMIs with with newly developed tungsten balanced bulbs that the gaffer moved and held during the scenes. For the moment where Maeve is peeking through a hole in the wall, we had three (!) 1K Par Cans aimed straight at her face.

The effect only worked if it was overcast, since the light levels were ten times as bright when the sun was out and my lighting wasn’t able to overpower that. We also made sure we never saw any sky in the frame, since that broke the effect as well. I created constrast by adding negative fill whenever possible. Lastly, by adding some smoke and a custom LUT, we arrived at the look you see in the movie.