day-for-night scenes looked extremely unconvincing when brightened up for TV broadcast. lighting technology for large night exteriors improved 3. audiences grew more savvy and demanded more realism 2. A classic and convincing day-for-night scene from “Jaws” (1975, DP: Bill Butler, ASC)ĭay-for-night fell out of fashion probably for a number of reasons: 1. It is hard to say whether the blue filters were an honest effort to make the sunlight look like moonlight or simply a way of winking to the audience: “Remember those black-and-white films where blue tinting meant you were watching a night scene? Well, this is the same thing.” This scene from “Ben Hur” (1959, DP: Robert Surtees, ASC) appears to be a matte painting combined with a heavily blue-tinted day-for-night shot. Whatever the reason, by the time it became possible to shoot in colour, blue had lodged in the minds of filmmakers and moviegoers as a shorthand for night.Įarly colour films often staged their night scenes during the day DPs underexposed and fitted blue filters in their matte boxes to create the illusion. (We saw in my recent article on white balance that, when dealing with incandescence at least, bluer actually means hotter.) This perception in turn may come from the way our skin turns bluer when cold, due to reduced blood flow, and redder when hot. It’s entirely possible that that choice to tint night scenes blue has as much to do with our perception of blue as a cold colour as it does with the functioning of our rods. The Complete Guide to Colour by Tom Fraser has this to say:Īs an interesting example of the objectivity of colour, Western films were tinted blue to indicate nighttime, since our eyes detect mostly blue wavelengths in low light, but orange served the same function in films about the Far East, presumably in reference to the warm evening light there. I would personally describe moonlight as a fragile, silvery grey.īlue moonlight on screen dates back to the early days of cinema, before colour cinematography was possible, but when enterprising producers were colour-tinting black-and-white films to get more bums on seats. In reality everything looks monochromatic under moonlight because there is only one type of rod, unlike the three types of cones (red, green and blue) which permit colour vision in brighter situations. This doesn’t actually mean that things look blue in moonlight exactly, just that objects which reflect blue light are more visible than those that don’t. These cells are more sensitive to blue than any other colour. One explanation is that, in low light, our vision comes from our rods, the most numerous type of receptor in the human retina (see my article “How Colour Works” for more on this). Yellow is literally the opposite (or complement) of blue, so where on (or off) Earth did this idea of blue cinematic moonlight come from? This is most noticeable when the moon is low in the sky, when the large amount of atmosphere that the light has to travel through turns the lunar disc quite red, just as with the sun, while at its zenith the moon merely looks yellow. When viewed from Earth, Rayleigh scattering by the atmosphere removes the bluer wavelengths of light. These elements give the moon its colour: grey, as seen best in photographs from the Apollo missions and images taken from space. What colour is moonlight? In cinema, the answer is often blue, but what is the reality? Where does the idea of blue moonlight come from? And how has the colour of cinematic moonlight evolved over the decades?Īccording to the lunar surface “is mostly oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium and aluminium”.
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