Lighting a Night Exterior Scene with Shane Hurlbut ASC | DIY Moonlight

How do you light Night Exteriors? What is your first stroke, what are some DIY solutions you can use, what bounce sources do you fly, what lights make the best moonlight sources, what do you set your camera’s color temp at to deliver silver grey moonlight?
These questions are all answered in our Lighting Night Exteriors Course.

Check out our blog filled with career advice, gear talk, and on set stories:

Be apart of our community!

Music by MusicBed
"Banged Up" by Tom Salta

#DIY #CinematographyTip

[GeordieMilne]

I have worked on film sets for 20+ years in many roles. Shane, the way you walk around directing and setting up is absolute magic!

[fzq]

fantastic. so I still have no idea how to do the light over a night scene.

[bensonq]

Great to see Jorge in this video!! Taught me so much while I was still a film school student.

[BadKarma]

Shane you are my favorite Director of photography terminator salvation was the best seriously I love what you did in that movie

[PjPerez]

This looks good (the little bit of "finished" we saw at the end), but one of the things that often bothers me about night exteriors is a lot of unmotivated lighting. Shots that look technically beautiful but make no sense practically. Really curious how to balance verisimilitude and aesthetics (and of course, the reality of a camera's low-light capture threshold).

[azfilmmaking]

Great tutorial as always. Are you renting all this things and hiring all these people just for tutorials?

[matthewlivingston]

What's the importance of salt and pepper? I always see condors with 20k tungsten and and 18k hmi for moonlight set ups. Also hundreds of titan tubes in salt and pepper settings on a huge rigs for night exteriors set ups?

[clintclarkson]

do you have a link to these sports fixtures?

[MikePriceLife]

Even this BTS instructional video is cinematic

[brucetrappleton]

Actually the first thing you set when lighting an exterior night, is your street lights, practical lights (like street signs, window stores, cars passing by, etc, if you are in an urban setting). Second, you establish your background light. And then, in accordance to the 2 variables mentioned above, you set your moonlight. Most likely it will be either a backlight, a 3/4 backlight or at the most, an overhead. The point is to set the moonlight in such a way that still will allow for deep shadows. Then you evaluate if you need a key light as well and some sort of fill.

[buzzcrushtrendkill]

Way too over lit for moonlight. Don't be afraid of the dark. Look at Dean Cundey's lighting in Halloween 1978, lots of blackness. Very realistic.

[theclosing]

crazy this is the guy christian bale flipped out on

[antdx]

wow, the area went from ugly to amazing