Shooting a night fight scene

thefilmgeek

thefilmgeek

Hey guys, long time no see. Been so busy with school/filming haven't had a chance to hop on boards much. Relating to filming, I ran into an issue.

I recently shot an outdoor fight scene at night using about 2000 watts of light. Of course, it wasn't enough I figured out once I got out there and tried to put the shutter speed higher than 90 and it was all dark. (GRRR!!)

What would be the best way to do something like this, since I will be filming the fight with a shutter of roughly 1/500? Is it possible to shoot something like this in daytime and give it the appearance of night in post? Thanks a lot.
 
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What most film makers do is either:
a.) shoot later in the day and use blue filters or you can set a smaller aperture so it will look darker out.
or
b.) you shoot during "the magic hour" which is right before the hour before the sun sets. It is a small amount of time but it is bright enough to see but dark enough to really look like night time.

Hope this helps you. I learned the hard way by trying to shoot with my friends headlights.
 
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Lots of options. Day for night (worst option), "magic hour", find an excuse for a practical to be in the scene (streetlight maybe) and shoot all 2K you have at one spot on the ground.
 
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There was actually a contest on this Forum which I participated in to help another member out with Day2night shots. You can do it in After Effects using a blue tint, but you have to mess around with the curves and all to get it to look right. Also, try not to have a lot of sky showing unless it's all one color (no clouds). There's a tutorial on this by Andrew Kramer on videocopilt.net. I can do it, it's juts hard to write out all the steps here because everyone uses a different technique when doing D2N scenes.
 
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