Blacking out windows

[spatter8]

Hello indietalk community!

I am shooting a short film that is set at night, with the majority of it set inside a house. Because of that, during the indoor scenes I plan on shooting during the day time and blacking out the windows to give the appearance of night.

However, I've never done this before so I don't know the best way to go about it. My first thought was trash bags, but they can be reflective at times.

Most of the windows have curtains, like this

but there are some windows that are completely bare, like this

Thanks in advance! WHIR!

 

[Dreadylocks]

Can you work it out that the windows aren't in the shot? If so, several layers of heavy-duty black trash bags will work just fine. Attach around the edges with gaffer tape.

 

[jax_rox]

Attach it on the outside of the window and then you can shoot straight into the windows if you need to, assuming they're not incredibly large.

 

[WhiteOpus]

i would go with a few black posterboards on the outside of the windows

 

[ZolaScope]

The previous answers of boards or bin bags are good, and cheap. We recently did this a slightly more expensive way, using Cinefoil, which - because of the semi-rigid nature of the foil - make blacking out three windows and one door very easy and fast.

 

[harmonica44]

This isn't about blocking out the sun, but I have a suggestion for you. You might think it looks cool, if you have moonlight are streetlight shining through the window. It just makes for cool lighting, when shooting a night scene in a house, in my opinion. Me and and an aspiring filmmaker did a practice shot where he used the sun and made it blue, and made it look like moonlight, and then used white tungsten lights for the indoor lights, but it looked like a night shot, with moonlight pouring in, the way he did it. Or you could have street light as well from a sign or something.

 

[spatter8]

Thanks for the replies!

This isn't about blocking out the sun, but I have a suggestion for you. You might think it looks cool, if you have moonlight are streetlight shining through the window. It just makes for cool lighting, when shooting a night scene in a house, in my opinion. Me and and an aspiring filmmaker did a practice shot where he used the sun and made it blue, and made it look like moonlight, and then used white tungsten lights for the indoor lights, but it looked like a night shot, with moonlight pouring in, the way he did it. Or you could have street light as well from a sign or something.

This is interesting. Do you have a sample vid or pic or something?

How did he make the sunlight blue?

 

[harmonica44]

Sorry all that stuff is on his computer right now. He shined daylight balanced lights in from the side. The camera was white balanced to tungsten lights, which caused the daylight balanced lights to look blue in the camera. We were not able to show the window in the shot, cause we needed the area to set up the daylight balanced lights, but the point of view looked like moonlight.

 

[spatter8]

Ok gotcha. Might try that out. Thanks!

 

[harmonica44]

For sure. If you white balance to tungsten lights, then you can have white tungsten light on one side, which will be indoor lights for the scene, and you can have blue daylight lights which will be the moonlight source. However, if you want your indoor lights to be orange, like a lot of movies nowadays are doing, then you will have to put orange gel on the tungsten lights.