Day for night
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- This article is about the movie technique. For other meanings, please see Day for night (disambiguation)
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Day for night, also known as nuit américaine ("American night"), is the name of a cinematographic technique to simulate a night scene. Mainly intended to avoid costly (and technically challenging) night filming, outside scenes were instead shot during the day, with special blue filters and under-exposed film creating the illusion of darkness or moonlight. Lighting the characters two to three stops more than the background also helps the effect, but doing so require powerful lights to compete with the sun. Many of the night scenes in "Jaws" were done this way, for example. While this technique has largely disappeared with improvements in film technology and increasing viewer expectations, it was recently used in the 2007 film 28 Weeks Later, due to it being impossible to shoot in an entirely dark London.
Interior Day-for-night shooting can be more time consuming and labor intensive. Grips need to cut all the daylight entering onto set. If the scene is "blocked" or staged away from windows or other openings to the outside, the light may be simply blacked out with cloth or plastic sheeting. However when windows or doors are seen from camera, these openings must be tinted to allow some exterior dressing to be seen.
While never fully successful in creating "realistic" night, the special visual style of the American night nowadays has many fans among historic movie buffs, thanks to its frequent use in early B-movies, Westerns, and film noir. Day-for-night shooting seems to have become more common in recent years which goes against the trends of a decade ago.
The title of François Truffaut's film Day for Night (1973) is a reference to this technique, since the film is about the process of moviemaking.
de:Day-for-Nightes:Noche americana fr:Nuit américaine
