imo vie: day into night
Use colour grading and add layered graphics to create a nocturnal look
Use colour grading to create a nocturnal look
Shooting video at night can be a challenge, especially when no strong light source is available.
The quality of footage can suffer due to the camera’s need to increase its ISO speed to make it more sensitive to low light; a fast ISO can make the clip look very grainy. To avoid these problems, many film-makers shoot during the day and then grade colours and tones. This involves adding a cold blue hue and reducing saturation and brightness.
iMovie has a dedicated Day into Night effect filter, though the result isn’t particularly realistic. Instead, we’ll demonstrate how to use iMovie’s grading tools to manually adjust a daytime clip’s colour temperature and tweak its tones to create a more convincing customised night-time scene.
Creative compositing
By compositing a full moon graphic into iMovie’s timeline you can help sell the nighttime effect. We created this project’s moon in Photoshop. iMovie can interpret the transparency information in a Photoshop document so that any object can be added to a video clip on a separate layer. We’ll show you how to position and scale a graphic using iMovie’s video overlay settings.
We’ll also show you how to integrate the composited moon and the graded background footage more effectively by adding a camera move to the clip. The addition of a vignette effect also helps blend the elements together and create a more convincing effect.
If you don’t have Photoshop, don’t worry – you can still follow the iMovie colour grading techniques in our walkthrough to produce a convincing day-to-night effect.