294 Chapter 13 Basic Lighting for Film and DV in practice Magic hour. In the 1978 film Days of Heaven, directed by Terrence Malick and photographed by Néstor Almendros, many of the scenes were famously shot during magic hour with no artifi- cial lighting. The film is widely considered to be one of the most visually stunning films in the his- tory of cinema. However, shooting extensively during magic hour severely limited the amount of time available per shooting day (according to Almendros, magic "hour" lasted around 25 minutes each day), so the production sched- ule was drastically extended, so much so that Almendros, contractually obligated to begin another film, had to leave the project before it was finished and the film was completed by another cinematographer, Haskell Wexler. Shooting at night. Gustavo Mercado's innova- tive short film Yield (2006) revolves around a brief but violent and ambiguous moment that is wit- nessed by a woman, the lead character. Trying to figure out exactly what happened, she recalls the moment three times and each time new clues begin to emerge--but we can't be sure if her memories, and the events of the film, are fact or selective perception. In one tense scene, the lead character meets up with a girl she perhaps saw brutalized earlier in the day; the scene takes place at a bus station late at night. Mercado was working fast, small, and with minimal equip- ment resources, so he carefully scouted for a location that, all on its own, had plenty of light to expose the film well, even in the late nighttime hours. He chose a sidewalk next to a rental car dealership that lit its expansive parking lot with very bright sodium streetlights. To this he added fill from two cheap, portable, battery-powered flood lights he bought at a hardware store. By using what was available in a resourceful way, Mercado was able, even without a generator, HMI movie lights, and a big crew, to create a stunning nighttime image to match this equally stunning moment in the film ( Figure 13-43 ).