Nighttime exteriors can be a daunting task for a DP. They always simultaneously excite me and cause me to immediately perspire whenever the words "EXT. NIGHT" appear in a script. Balancing time, budget, manpower, and equipment can feel like a shot in the dark (pun intended) during pre-production, especially if you’ve never tackled the task before. While I'm still learning and experimenting with night exteriors, I thought I'd share a few scenes from a recent TV movie I shot and discuss how we transformed the script's words into visuals on the screen.

The Location

Martini Town is a self-contained city street set in Vancouver frequently used for filming. Fortunately, I had shot there a year earlier, so I had a good understanding of the layout. However, during my previous visit, we worked on a full daytime exterior schedule, which made this visit feel like a brand new experience to wrap my head around. The schedule for this project involved both day and night exteriors, which proved helpful when discussing with the production manager the need for a 60-foot condor. It would serve a dual purpose, as a 20x20 fly swatter during the day and as a lovely ambient "moon" bounce at night.

Let the Lighting Begin

Whenever possible, I like to light sets with broad strokes, allowing actors the freedom to move freely without being forced to hit highly specific marks. The best way to achieve this is by building lighting into the set that serve as both practicals and key sources. Specifically for this shoot, the theatre frontage was the hub that every scene revolved around. This allowed us to use the theatre's marquee as a key focal point, drawing the audience’s attention to the venue while also casting a large, beautiful key light that was motivated by both the story and realism.

The marquee had built in dimmable tungsten bulbs behind opaque plastic, which allowed us to control it with ease from setup to setup. Our gaffer extraordinaire, Alex Ma, had his talented crew rig every practical light source on location into Blackout Lighting, allowing him to dim or change colours of any practical source on set via iPad. By utilizing the strengths of the location, we were able to move efficiently between setups without needing to walk our key light out of frame for every new shot.

Now that the key light was decided all we had to do was light the background so we weren’t shooting into a black void. This is when the 20x20 flyswatter came in handy. During the day the we used a 20x20 1/4 grid to help shape the sun. As night fell, we skinned it, hung a 20x20 bleached muslin, sent it about 40ft up and bounced a 4k HMI into it from the floor. The 20x20 was tabled, allowing it to evenly push blue light into the set as well as filling the background. The 4k HMI was chosen to create colour contrast with the marquees warm tungsten light and the HMI’s silver blue. 90% of the time when using tungsten, I will dim them to 50% or lower to warm up them up to 2000-2500k. This is one of the main reasons I still tend to use actual tungsten rather then LEDs.

Finally, most of the store frontages had fantastic awnings which was prime real estate for Astera Titan Tubes. We zap strapped 2 Titan tubed per awning, and in order to create more visual interest, set them to 4000k with plus green to give an off fluorescent feeling. For the turnaround all we did was scrim down the 4k HMI so that it wouldn’t overpower the marquee and that was it.

Scene #2

This shot was as simple as it gets, we simply dimmed down the marquee as it was cooking way into overexposure and moved the 20x20 so that it pushed into the alleyway, becoming the key source for our mysterious man on the phone. From memory we tilted the 20x20 approximately 15 degrees into set to get more push out of it.

Candlelight Vigil

For this scene, all we did was “extend” the marquees already established lighting by adding a 12x20 unbleached muslin on the floor with 2x 2k Blondes and 2x Arri 650s on preemies bouncing into it. I am a huge fan of bouncing into unbleached muslin, something that my gaffer Alex Ma and Key Grip David Durnie can attest too from the countless occasions that I have asked for this type of source. We also drove the 20x20 bleached muslin around and down the other side of the street to continue on the silver blue back/edge light we established in earlier scenes.

This shot above was the final shot/ scene of the day, in which our cast exit the venue and walk down the city streets in a long walk and talk. We were running out of time at this point and unfortunately had to forego the 20x20 HMI bounce as it was across the other side of the set for the vigil scene and we didn’t have enough time to drive it back over. Thankfully, as we had spent the time in the morning setting up the set in its entirety, this was the only missing piece from the shot and allowed us to jump in immediately to shoot a 1-2 minute walk and talk with minimal setup. The “neon” practical lights on the diner in the background were also a life saver. It ensured that this section of the frame wasn’t a complete black void with the HMI not being able to make it over. We reused the 12x20 unbleached muslin bounce used on the vigil scene, merely shifting it 6-8ft frame left in order to wrap it deeper into the casts left eyes.

Night Exteriors