"Night Filming"

The term "Night Shooting" is a film scheduling term that means that the film production takes place at night. Related terms are "Night for Day" which means that you shoot a daytime scene at night. These shooting practices are common in plots of horror films. Both of these practices should be avoided if at all possible and these are the reasons why:

1)One or two days of night shooting may not have a harmful effect but anything more will dramatically reduce the productivity of the crew and actors by almost 50%!!
2) Scheduling nightmares! When you go from shooting night time shoots to day time shoots you need to give the crew and actors the required turnover time between calltimes (even if you wrap night time shoots on Friday night and begin Monday morning).

You might be asking why I am blogging about a scheduling issue for my first blog in "Film Budget"? Because, these scheduling issues have a detrimental effect on your bottom line and they are the easiest to solve!

When the crew is less productive, it is more probable to run into overtime ($$$) and possibly accidents happen ($$$). The best way to deal with night time shooting is to shoot all of the interior night scenes during the daytime but light the scenes for a night time look. All exterior night scenes should be grouped together and saved for the last days of shooting (to avoid the scheduling turnover issue). This strategy minimizes the harmful effects on your film budget.

For more information, see film budget guidelines on how to budget a horror film filled with night time shoots.

-Adam