Night exterior

Simulator

Dark enough, visible enough

A night exterior has to be dark enough to read as night and bright enough that an audience can follow a face. The answer is never a level, it is the ratio between a cold edge, a warm source and almost nothing else.

• Moonlight is a convention

  Real moonlight is roughly the colour of sunlight and far too dim to shoot. The cold blue backlight everyone calls moonlight is a language the audience learned from films, and it works because they learned it.

• Backlight first

  The single most useful unit on a night exterior is behind the subject, not in front. An edge on the shoulders and hair separates them from the dark and tells you the shape of the scene.

• Motivate the warm

  A practical, a window, a fire, a street lamp. One warm source in or near frame gives the eye a reason for the light and a colour to contrast the cold against. Without it, blue everywhere just looks like a mistake.

• Ambient is the trap

  A little lifts the blacks enough to see into; too much and the frame becomes an evenly lit grey scene with a blue cast. The moment you can see everything, it has stopped being night.

• Eyes need something

  At night levels, eye sockets go black and the performance disappears. A tiny unit near the lens, far too dim to light anything else, puts the catchlight back.

• Expose for the face, not the frame

  Meter the face and let everything else fall where it falls. A night exterior is mostly underexposed by design; the one thing that must not be is the person you are following.