\u201cThe director, Michiel Blanchart is a friend of mine, and we’ve been shooting short films for a few years now,\u201d begins Vannoorenberghe. \u201cFrom the time I was able to work with him, I did a short film which he financed himself, called Ass (<\/em>cul<\/em>)<\/em>. It was well received in some short film circles in Belgium. Then he got the funding for the short film, You’re Dead H\u00e9l\u00e8ne<\/em> and we did that together. We are close friends and he was kind enough to ask me to shoot this feature, though production were not convinced at first. I had done some features, but not some action stuff before, but he wanted to work with me, so I was lucky enough to do the movie with him.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n When it came to initial conversations about the look of thefilm Vannoorenberghe and Blanchart discussed common aesthetics. \u201cMichiel and I have lots of common grounds in terms of the movies we grew up with and the movies that we like,\u201d says Vannoorenberghe. \u201cHe likes CinemaScope formats and anamorphic format, but he also likes the versatility of lenses and anamorphic doesn\u2019t always offer that. He was ok with the fact that if we were going to shoot on anamorphic that we could have those details and accidents we can have with those lenses. That was a plus for our movie as it would bring texture and roughness to it. He was okay with having lens that weren\u2019t perfect in terms of focus.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the films mentioned during prep was David Fincher\u2019s Seven<\/em>. \u201cWe also spoke about Tony Scott\u2019s 80s and 90s movies. We both love backlights and for the film we did before this one, Michiel told me that he wanted more backlights. The more the anamorphic, flares, backlight, the more extreme the backlights and dramatic the light, the more he likes it. On top of that we wanted more movement. Lens-wise we had the KOWA anamorphics from Eye-Lite Belgium and the KOWA\u2019s are very light, which was great for us. Still, we wanted to be able to do a dramatic focus rack from further away to close focus. We kept the 65mm macro Cook anamorphic, which helped a lot for car interiors and close-ups for being fast.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn terms of the look, it was quite straightforward,\u201d explains Vannoorenberghe. \u201cWe had some discussions in post about the amount of green we wanted to put in the blacks because we wanted to dirty it up a little more and we didn\u2019t want the orange of the street to be too red. We had a LUT that faded out a lot of the red. We still wanted to have some reds, but not to be monochromatic. The movie is a greenish yellow with white blues. I also didn\u2019t want it to be too multicoloured as lots of modern movies with LED lighting. I feel it is easy to have something beautiful in multicolour, but I feel it\u2019s sometimes better not to go that way. We didn\u2019t want to emulate that lighting space and aimed to be less rich in colours.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The lighting proved to be challenging due to most of the action taking place at night. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have the budget to be able to afford lots of cranes or lifts in night exteriors,\u201d adds Vannoorenberghe. \u201cWe wanted to have something else other than sodium lighting and to achieve some kind of 80s bicolour look. It ultimately isn\u2019t that as we changed some stuff, but that influenced the look.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the lighting proved to be difficult, the main challenge for Vannoorenberghe were the car chases. \u201cI couldn’t always be in the car for the shots, so I would see the shotsafterwards and I had to guess with the gaffer. Michiel, in his head had the car flipping scene as one shot, but we still covered it for the aftermath in case there was any problem. For the main shot with the car coming towards us, we used an aerogrip car from a French company called Auto Travelling Cascades. They were just driving towards the car coming towards them with the camera on the crane. Then we had another fixed camera which was very wide with the bridge and the train to do plates afterwards of trains passing and the sky because we shot all that before the sun came out. So, we had another camera to see the flip and afterwards the police cars arriving, so it was locked there. We also had another camera hidden between two trash bags in shot of the first camera, doing a pan but it wasn\u2019t used in the edit. We had another camera in the car behind the car flipping, which was set up in a car following it. It\u2019s a big set-up, but we only had one opportunity to flip the car, so we had to cover ourselves. We had three similar cars. One for acting, one for the flip and one modified to be driven by the stunt driver with the actor next to him and even that was tricky, so we had to cover ourselves on this particular scene. We were trying to seem higher budget than what we had. It was thanks to Michiel and his ability to tweak some shots that we pulled it off.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Vannoorenberghe captured the film with the Sony VENICE 1. \u201cWe used the VENICE because some of our interiors were very compact and this camera was ideal for some handheld shots, especially for the scenes in the brothel,\u201d he explains. \u201cIt was easier not to have a big camera and also budget-wise I couldn\u2019t afford a big light source because it meant a big power supply and big teams, so the most powerful light we had was M40. The Venice helped as it\u2019s very sensitive. The Rialto was ideal for handheld, car interiors and car rigging.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The film takes places across Brussels and some of the locations are quite public. \u201cMichiel had to rewrite some scenes and throw away some scenes and places he wanted to film, especially for some of the car chase locations,\u201d he notes. \u201cI know production had a very hard time getting authorisation for some of the more important sets, such as Gare de Bruxelles-Nord and our interior for that was another station. The locations team was quite overwhelmed with all they had to. In the first scene we discover the bad guy and we were high up in a building that was under construction. We were supposed to have windows lit up through the glass and we were supposed to see the city. They were so busy trying to get permission to shoot in some locations, but Bruxelles-Nord was the biggest location, as well as the scene with the car flipping. Also, Place Poelaert in the Black Lives Matter protest was the other big location.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n In one chase sequence, Mady escapes on a bike and heads towards the metro. This particular shot required meticulous planning. \u201cThat was a shot that Michiel already had in mind before making this movie,\u201d Vannoorenberghe recalls. \u201cWe started prepping it almost one year in advance and we were having meetings during my lunch breaks, discussing how we could achieve it. I had met a drone operator on another project. He was modifying cameras to be more lightweight and was doing some very pretty stuff for commercial use. We presumed we wouldn\u2019t have much time to do the shot, so I wanted to do it so the viewer couldn\u2019t tell that it was drone right away. We were trying to develop a drone and we built it so that we could put a RED KOMODO on it with ultra prime lens, which was quite lightweight. We tried this movement with it and there was a bit of back and forth with the tone testing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe did this shot on the very last day of the shoot as we didn\u2019t know if we would be able to do it,\u201d he continues. \u201cWe weren\u2019t allowed to shoot there for more than three and a half hours, so that meant only one or two rehearsals and then the shoot itself. We had to follow the bike and then jump onto the train to do the shots that are inside the subway. The stunt biker did some testing on similar staircases far from the subway, with his drone that he was developing. We then did one rehearsal with his modified drone. At the end of the staircase there is an advertising video wall passing on the foreground witch purpose is to stitch the drone shot to the Steadicam shot on the platform. The stunt guy has his hood on for obvious purposes, and then after the panel it\u2019s the actor on the platform. We had to remove one glass for the drone to be able to fly next to the stairs and had to wait three months for permission to do that, so that the drone could go down the platform. There is the advertising panel and then we cut there and switch to the Steadicam and then the actor does the last few stairs and then goes onto the train.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n La nuit se <\/em>tra\u00eene<\/em> <\/em>was shot across a period of 36.5 days. \u201cIt was quite exhausting,\u201d Vannoorenberghe admits. \u201cIt was mostly cold nights and lots of stuff happening simultaneously and lots of ground to cover and not being able to see everything. It helped that we trusted everybody that we worked with. It was mostly the same team that had worked on Michiel\u2019s short films, which was comforting for us because we had friends across the team who believed in the movie and were people we trusted before, even before we started working on the project. I enjoyed everything on this film, but I haven\u2019t done lots of movies before and I\u2019m still young. I was enjoying it because Michiel is very precise and he knows what he wants. We never disagree and I never doubted the choices. Everything is transparent and that\u2019s a real pleasure because it\u2019s nice to always understand everything. It was my best friend\u2019s movie, so I was always happy on set.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n By Oliver Webb<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After responding to an emergency call from a mysterious woman, Mady, a young locksmith gets entangled in a bizarre case and must fight to prove his innocence. La nuit se tra\u00eene was brilliantly captured by DOP Sylvestre Vannoorenberghe SBC. \u201cThe director, Michiel Blanchart is a friend of mine, and we’ve been shooting short films for a few years now,\u201d begins Vannoorenberghe. \u201cFrom the time I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":13866,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rs_blank_template":"","rs_page_bg_color":"","slide_template_v7":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-productions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sbcine.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sbcine.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sbcine.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sbcine.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/90"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sbcine.be\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13863"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sbcine.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13876,"href":"https:\/\/www.sbcine.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13863\/revisions\/13876"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sbcine.be\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sbcine.be\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sbcine.be\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sbcine.be\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sbcine.be\/wp-content\/uploads\/\/2025\/01\/P2111779-1200x676.jpg\")
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The wall where the bike crashes was replaced with another advertising panel. \u201cLighting-wise we were able to switch a few lights off in the station and add the carpet lights here and there, mostly to add bright spots,\u201d explains Vannoorenberghe. \u201cThe whole movie was filled with bright spots and flare and things that make you squint a little bit. We still wanted to have that in the subway and not change it so that the viewer doesn\u2019t know we are obviously using another tool or something. I\u2019m a bit regretful because the whole purpose of that scene was to not be able to see the switch and when I see it, I can notice it, but I don\u2019t know if the viewer sees it. We are really proud of it though.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n