Monotreme
04-13-2009, 06:43 AM
So last night I saw The Bridge on the River Kwai for the first time. Amazing movie, enjoyed the hell out of it; shot right up into my top 100 movies list. But there was one part about it that bothered me, and it's the same thing with many, many of these old movies: I'm talking about day for night.
I understand that there seems to have been a technical problem filming on location at night. Not enough light, I can only presume. But still, I think that this technique that they chose in order to solve this problem is pretty ridiculous. I mean, there are scenes in Bridge that are supposed to take place at night, but had that fact not been mentioned in the dialogue, I would never have been able to tell the difference. It basically looks like mid-day, just the screen is slightly darker. And I'm sure everyone from David Lean to Cecil B. DeMille knew that a sunny afternoon looks nothing like the middle of the night.
Even in some new movies this technique is present and painfully obvious, despite measures taken to hide it. In Cast Away, for example, most of the night scenes are actually shot at night, but one scene in particular, when Chuck gets mad at Wilson and kicks him out of the cave only to regret it and run out into the sea looking for him, it's obviously shot as day-for-night. Robert Zemeckis tries his very hardest to hide this fact - he replaces the sky with a CGI night sky with stars and a moon and tints the entire image dark blue, but the footage of Hanks on the island is still obviously shot in mid-day.
So here's what I don't get. Football field floodlights can light a very large area quite well at the dead of night, and it still looks like night even though it's flooded with light. Could this not be a better replacement for artificial moonlight than shooting during the day and "pretending" it's night?
Does this bother anyone else, or do most people succumb easily to the illusion and is it just me that is really bothered by it?
I understand that there seems to have been a technical problem filming on location at night. Not enough light, I can only presume. But still, I think that this technique that they chose in order to solve this problem is pretty ridiculous. I mean, there are scenes in Bridge that are supposed to take place at night, but had that fact not been mentioned in the dialogue, I would never have been able to tell the difference. It basically looks like mid-day, just the screen is slightly darker. And I'm sure everyone from David Lean to Cecil B. DeMille knew that a sunny afternoon looks nothing like the middle of the night.
Even in some new movies this technique is present and painfully obvious, despite measures taken to hide it. In Cast Away, for example, most of the night scenes are actually shot at night, but one scene in particular, when Chuck gets mad at Wilson and kicks him out of the cave only to regret it and run out into the sea looking for him, it's obviously shot as day-for-night. Robert Zemeckis tries his very hardest to hide this fact - he replaces the sky with a CGI night sky with stars and a moon and tints the entire image dark blue, but the footage of Hanks on the island is still obviously shot in mid-day.
So here's what I don't get. Football field floodlights can light a very large area quite well at the dead of night, and it still looks like night even though it's flooded with light. Could this not be a better replacement for artificial moonlight than shooting during the day and "pretending" it's night?
Does this bother anyone else, or do most people succumb easily to the illusion and is it just me that is really bothered by it?