Day for night  

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Day-for-night is a term used for describing when film crews shoot scenes scripted for night but shot during the day. 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.

Day-for-night is a time consuming and labor intensive choice for producers and only used when scheduling or location restrictions do not allow actual night shooting. When shooting interiors day-for-night on location, 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 tented to allow some exterior dressing to be seen.

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, the 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 then 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. However, the technique disappeared with improvements in film technology and increasing viewer expectations.

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.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Day for night" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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