Production Blog: I Wasn't There....But the Videos Look Great(also, I learned about day-for-night editing!)

 I Wasn’t There….But the Videos Look Great!

So, as we all have learned, life happens. And when life happens, it can feel like the end of the world, or for me, the end of my high school career. However, life does go on. As overdramatic as that can seem, I care a lot about this class and want to succeed. Of course, this does lead to increased pressure on myself, but I’m currently working to get better at that. 

In short, because of this pressure, I was a little worried about not being able to be at the filming shoot today. I wasn’t able to go because I didn’t have any transportation, which is honestly happening constantly. 

As upsetting as that can be, I decided I needed to use the time I had productively. For this film, we need to be able to use a technique called “day-for-night” filming, in which all scenes are filmed during the day, but the necessary scenes are edited to look like night. I heard of this technique through a review I saw for Jordan Peele’s “Nope”, so I decided to dig deeper into it.  We were advised to not film at night, as it can make the shot extremely hard to see. This technique is our best bet to ensure that the film resembles our original vision. I ended up finding a great web page that explains what day-for-night is, how to properly achieve it, and what pitfalls to avoid. It’s on a site called “studiobinder.com” and the author of this particular article is Sam Kench. 

The first thing Kench describes about day-for-night shooting is the fact that it relies heavily on color correction and color grading, and there are tutorials provided on how to use these techniques in certain editing softwares. He then describes certain drawbacks, which include how it can often look cheap or unprofessional, if done incorrectly. The way I see it, I’ll just need to practice the technique so our group can have the best possible results. 

The last thing I decided to do was actually watch the videos. I was sent the videos that were obtained and they turned out really good! Our actors emoted well and spoke clearly, which was a concern of mine. My teachers lectured the AS Level students for having unclear speech in their projects, so I’m glad our group didn’t make that mistake. I’ll need to start choosing the shots to use and making a folder to hold all of our files, but other than that, today ended up great, even if I wasn’t able to film today.

Pictured- An example of a day-for-night shot