Day for Night Study

Inspired by motion picture films shot during the day made to look like night Dune (2021), Nope (2022), Mad Max: Fury Road - (2015), Casablanca (1942), also known as shooting "day for night", I've set out to study that technique through still photographs and motion picture.

Through this study, I challenged myself to introduce elements to help sell the day for night technique such as adding warm light sources to contrast the dark blue tones our mind associates with night scenes, adding stars in the sky in post, and shaping the non-ambient light sources to mimic hard moonlight.

I've been a photographer for many years but transitioned to filmmaking ever since I caught the bug when I shot my first short film in 2016. Since 2022, I've focused on music video production. I shot a music video for Atria's track, Pathogens in 2025 where we shot some scenes during the day - make to look like a night-lit wooded area. In pre-planning for that project, I did a little bit of research on how Nope, and Mad Mad - Fury Road was shot to help me decide which technique I should use since each film approaches the day for night technique differently. However, after completing this day for night photography study, I feel that I would approach another video project differently having learned from my technique experiments along the way.

Day for Night in Motion Pictures

Dune

For Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021), cinematographer Greig Fraser didn't just use the standard "day-for-night" technique, which usually involves underexposing footage and adding a blue tint in post-production. Instead, he pioneered a specific method often referred to as "Day-for-Night-for-Day" or "Solarized Night."

The goal was to avoid that "fake blue" look of old Hollywood and instead capture the high-contrast, silvery look of a world lit only by moons.

Fraser and his team used a workaround:

1. Overexposure in the Sun: They shot the scenes in the bright, harsh sunlight of the Jordanian desert but overexposed the image significantly. This allowed them to capture a massive amount of detail in the shadows while letting the highlights "blow out" slightly.

2. Color Transformation (LUTs): During the digital intermediate process, they didn't just darken the image. They converted the colors into a monochrome or near-monochrome palette and then inverted or shifted the luminance values. By crushing the blacks and keeping the highlights sharp and "crisp," they mimicked the way the human eye perceives low-light environments under a full moon.

3. Using post visual effects such as darkening the subjects to create silloutes helps sell the day for night technique.

Nope

Nope each took a very different approach to more realistically sell the day for night technique. Nope was shot during the day exposed normally but careful not to clip the highlights. Nope was shot using wide 65mm IMAX camera and wanted to capture the night view of the desert valley's stunning expanse.

Now, if they were to simply grade the footage to look like night, the sky would noticeably be much brighter than the foreground - totally giving away the illusion. Director of Photography Hoyte van Hoytema explained in a Kodac article, that two cameras were used much like a stereoscopic rig. Since both cameras used were the same 65mm format: an IMAX camera faced forward to capture a standard color capture, and a second digital camera pointed up towards a special one-way mirror called a beam splitter angled 45 degrees to capture only infra-red light. The infra-red light camera allows the sky to be captured in a way that can easily mask the bright sky of the film camera. With both cameras perfectly aligned to eachother, we get the benefit of having full control of the color palet while displaying a dark sky.

To me, the technical wizardry and ambition to shoot so many scenes day for night that centers its story around the sky is nothing short of incredible.

Digital Trends has a great article with commentary by SFX Supervisor Guillaume Rocheron.

Mad Max - Fury Road

Mad Max - Fury Road approached day for night a bit like Dune by overexposing by two stops but keeping careful not to clip the highlights of subjects below the horizon. In post the darks were normalized and the details of the midtones and highlights are brought down to almost shadow-like levels but just enough to provide a bit of grit to the details. A heavy blue grade was then applied - only reserving a small amount of color. 

The desert horizon made sky replacement a relatively simple task. If trees obstructed the horizon, sky replacement - especially when it comes to motion pictures, would not be as simple. Other items to sell the day for night technique for this film include smoke / mist, lightning, headlights, search beams, and the list goes on. 

Read more about Colorist Eric Whipp on Mad Max - Fury Road.

Photography Study

Having studied these methods, I wanted to put these new tools to practice. I don't own a infrared camera and a beam splitter used in Nope, but I am able to apply the techniques used in Dune and Mad Max. My photography body of work as it was displayed during my Day for Night exhibit consists mostly of photos shot with the intention of applying day for night techniques. Some photos, especially those with models, were planned days in advnace with a certain scene in mind.

For example, one photograph was with a young woman looking into a wooded garden carrying a lamp. It was shot at around 10am in the late summer. The goal was to make it look cool and dark. I had read from another photographer that it was best to set the camera to a cooler temperature like 2800K and use a warm gel for the strobe and tried to use that technique. However the colors looked slightly off with saturated greens and purplish hues of blue that made it quite difficult to recover from. While I was happy with the result in the end, I changed my approach to standard daytime temperature - typically 5600K and that gives me more than enough latitude to cool in post if I need to while preserving color. 

One of the goals of this study was to use my own stock images for any composited effects such as stars, clouds, lens flares, etc. In "Keeper of the Night", I composited a moon with a slight halow of fog around it and added stars. I also added lights along the bridge as can be seen during the night when it's actually lit up. Those lights were essentially just painted in - not using any composite from a nighttime photo. Who cares if the moon is on the opposite side of the sky to make sense of the shadow direction? If it works it works. 

To make things interesting, I wanted to create a scene as if it were straight of an old movie. What better story is there other than the infamous Jack the Ripper? That shot required a lot of coordination starting with scouting the right location that could pass as 1890s London. A parking garage next to a dance club in Oldtown, Wichita would have to do. I specifically wanted a lamp post in the shot so I could create some interesting backlight. After setting up the tripod, I had fired off a few shots before staging the actors when clouds were in the frame. I would use one of those frame to introduce clouds in the base shot when the clouds has long passed and was just a clean blue boring sky. I used a single speed light to light this entire shot. The actors were instructed to stay still as possible while I moved the strobe from the keylight position above to behind them - trying to align the backlight the best I could with the motivated light coming from the parking garage lamp post in the background. The final image was the result from multiple images and several masking techniques. 

Jack the Ripper

Applying this Study Towards Motion Picture

Day for Night with still photography can be done with a little planning a editing is really not too complicated for those who are comfortable with composite editing. Applying these techniques towards motion picture introduces a new set of obstacles. 

Tracking

Unless the camera is anchored to a tripod and the actors don't inferere with any of the composited lights or peak above the horizon line (which is pretty much an impossible situation), tracking will need to be performed in order to lock the composited plates (or layers) to complete the day for night illusion. 

Choosing the right location

Sky replacement can easily be done as long as the horizon line does not contain any trees since trees have tiny pockets of lights and darks that will introduce splotchy artifacts and simply cannot be rotoscoped. What do the three movies discussed earlier have in common? Their day for night scenes were all set in the desert. I don't think that's a coincidence. Those locations were chosen because the desert allowed a clean horizon line for eazy sky replacement compositing. 

A dark scene with no lights is easy to lay a simple day for night LUT and sky replace, but adding night elements such as street lamps, neon signs, or a moon to provide backlight can really help sell the technique - but you have to choose the right location that will allow for those motivated light sources. Location is key to a great day for night shot.

ChoosING the right LUT for the story

If you look at the movie NOPE, the color grade is mostly unsaturated and in my opinion, is closer to the color palette that we see with our own eyes. It works because we are to believe we are in a natural world. Whereas with Dune and Mad Max, they day for night techniques used were rather other worldly, with specially designed LUTs to sell the technique while making night feel a bit strange. 

LightING contrast

I've heard from other DPs that they like to incorporate a high contrast ratio to emmulate the moon. However from my finding is that the moon has less contast than that of the day time sun. As I approched the end of my study, I feel I was more often lifting the midtones and decreasing the highlights to acheive what was a more natural moonlight to my eye. 

Closely related to contrast is that the night sky is most often darker than the foreground. 

That's why I think Nope really sold the day for night effect for me. The combination of he infrared digital with the colored film camera was really genious. However, filming with another camera with an ND filter and about four stops under exposed might produce the same desired effect without infrared. Another experiment to try is to composite a negative image for the sky but colored to dark blue. 

In my photo titled "Distant Church in the City", I shot it with two exposures, one for the foreground and another image with the iris stopped down to F11 along with a high shutter speed and ND filter to be able to blend in a dark sky onto what appears to be a slightly lighter foreground.