How to Film a Day for Night Scene on a Budget

In this video, I show you how I filmed a day for night scene on a budget, using very affordable lighting. I haven't had much of a reason to film a day for night scene in the past and so I thought I'd give it a try!

Day for night is not something I've needed to do before, and so I thought I'd give it a try, to see what I could achieve with a budget lighting setup.

Day for night is a useful way of shooting night scenes when you have a limited budget and don't have enough resources to properly light a shot at night.

I personally would prefer to actually shoot at night if possible, but when that's not the case, this is a great option.

For gear reference, I'm shooting this on a Sony A7 mark iii with a 35 mm lens. I'm using S-Log3 with S-Gamut3.Cine.

My shutter is set at 50 and my aperture is ranging from 4 to 1.8 for these shots. I experimented a bit with my ISO, but for the most part, I kept it at the native S-Log3 ISO of 800.

My lights were a cheap 80 W bulb from Amazon and an Aperture MC.

I filmed this in our living room and one of the main disadvantages of filming in here is that it has bright walls and make it harder to control the light.

Here are a couple of setups of the kind of shot I wanted with midday sun coming through the window.

One of the easiest things to do to create a day for night would be to simply, adjust the colours of this shot in post. I'm not a big fan of this, as it often looks far too blue. The hardness of the light coming through the window is similar to moonlight, however. As with the sun, the moon is naturally far away and so while it may be a large light source, because it is so far away it is actually a hard light source.

I decided I wanted to block out the natural light completely and use artificial lights, to have more control.

The first thing I did was to use our curtains to block out as much as possible from the window. I then covered up the curtains as they were pale and also closed the door which was adding some ambient light.

I then bought in the 80 w daylight bulb to start setting up the shot.

Without any diffusion and directly facing our subject, this is very harsh. To soften it up a bit and to try and create some diffused moonlight through clouds. I simply covered the bulb with a blueish piece of material we had lying around. It's not perfect but works ok as a makeshift colour temperature blue gel or CTB. This could be passable as a day for night with a bit of a grade.

It was still a bit too harsh for my liking and so I decided to bounce it off the white side of a 5 in one reflector. This is already not a very bright light and so by diffusing it and then bouncing it, I lose a lot of output. To make up that exposure, I opened up my aperture from 4 to 1.8.

I could have left it there, but I wanted to make it a bit more interesting by adding some colour contrast. I wanted to have a practical light in the frame to do this and so I added a candle to the opposite side of the subject. By itself, this wouldn't have been bright enough and so I used my Aperture MC to mimic the candlelight.

The key here when mixing colour temperatures is to have your white balance in a place where everything looks relatively natural. I wanted the candle to still appear bright and orange while not letting my moonlight get too blue. In the end, I decided on 4000 kelvin for my white balance. This, of course, could be slightly adjusted in post, but as the A7iii is only 8-bit, I try not to push my colours too far.

With a bit of a grade, I was quite happy with how this turned out. It's not perfect but it was a good experiment with what I had access to.