Nocturne: lighting a horse at the blue hour

The blue hour gives you about twenty minutes. For Hollow Hills' Nocturne we had one horse, one field and four evenings, which is eighty minutes of light for a three-minute film.

Plan the light, not the shots

We broke the twenty minutes into five-minute windows and gave each window one job: wides first while the sky still held detail, then mediums, then the close-ups on the horse's eye with a single lantern doing the work.

The generated passes were planned the same way. We shot clean plates of the empty field in every window, so anything we added later would sit under the right sky.

The horse decided where to stand. Everything else was decided the week before.

One lantern

The lantern was the only light we brought. Anything brighter and the sky falls apart on film. It meant pushing the stock two stops and accepting the grain, which turned out to be the look of the whole piece.