Hi!..I’m kind of having a hard time achieving a similar type of lighting that was done in the trailer of Dawn of War 2 for my thesis. I’ve been wondering how do you make a light set up for a night scene?
My thesis location is in a forest and I’ve been wondering how can i make it look interesting. My story is a bit of a darker version Alice in Wonderland type of story
reference video of dawn of war 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu4ABhVd28U
thanks for the help and time 
This is a really broad question and it really depends on what kind of style/mood you’re going for in your scene.
Are there any practicals in the scene? (Street lights, lamps, flash lights, LEDs, etc.) There are many movies that will forego the use of any moonlight and just have the practical lights light up the scene. Just so we’re clear, a practical is any object in the scene that emits light. So if we have a lamp behind a character, we can give him a rim back light to make it look like it is coming from the lamp, even though we’re using another light to enhance this. Good examples of this are from Roger Deakins who shot “Assasination of Jesse James” and “No Country for Old Men”
Now you can do the standard moon light lighting, or Hollywood lighting. This matches your reference footage. What you want to try to do is keep the foreground darker than your background. This will help give the feeling of the foreground characters being in shadow. You can also add back lights and rim lights to set the characters apart from the background. Play with silhouettes and shapes in your shadows. Put objects in front of your key lights to break it up and add visual interest. You can see that they did this for the Dawn of War trailer by adding a cookie, or Cucoloris (tree image with transparency), in front of the the key light. Once you establish your key, you can then add a bit of fill depending on whether or not you want to see more detail in an area. This would be bounce light and much softer and darker than your key.
When lighting with moon light, remember that the source is far away. So the shadows are actually quite hard, because we’re closer to the ground than we are to the moon. You can also give it a slight blue tinge and desaturate the image, since color is the first thing to go when we get into low light situations. You can also add a bit of shallow depth of field to simulate a camera lens being wide open to help sell the effect.
I hope this has been helpful in some way. Good luck on your thesis!
One last thing, another form of filming night would be day for night. This is where you expose the image for the backlight, the sun, and under expose keep everything else. You would also try to keep the sky out of the frame or use a gradient filter on the top of the frame to darken it. It was used a lot for big open spaces light westerns and B movies. The French called it “American Night”. And when done correctly, it can look good. Just add some crickets sfx to help sell the effect.
wow! thank you Mr. Eslinger for taking your time to explain to me how to achieve the lighting effect that I would want I will post updates of the lighting starting next week since I am working on my storyboard for now.
I searched for Hollywood lighting and I see that the set upi is similar to three point lighting? As for the day for night, I will research more to understand it further. Thank you for your time
Yeah, Hollywood lighting is fantastical. You’ll see a lot of examples of this in major block buster type movies. Your more indie and dramatic type movies will do something a little more practical and real.
Definitely keep us updated! I’d love to see some renders. Happy storyboarding!
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