The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power cinematographer explains how to make watchable night scenes

One of the lowest lows of the final and quite disappointing season of Game of Thrones was the big conclusive fight at Winterfell between the living heroes and the undead army of the Night King and the Whitewalkers. While the idea was mostly great in concept, albeit with some key plot slips, the main issue with this epic episode was that it was taking place at night and was basically unwatchable due to it being too dark. So, with that immense slip-up in mind, you might have been worried to hear that The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power had a big night episode planned too.

Fortunately, the creative team behind the show and cinematographer Alex Disenhof determined a solution to ensure there were no big issues with this night episode. In an interview with Collider, he explains the steps he took to make sure the show looked good even under the light of the moon.

“One way that we came up with earlier and to get around that was the fact that they’d been hurling giant fireballs at the city for a long time. And so we let that be our guide. And I was able to use real fire, and fake fire that we lit with lights, as our key for a lot of the scene. We still had this moonlit ambiance you can see in the shadows a little bit, so it doesn’t go pitch black, but it still has a mood to it.”

This doesn’t mean that Disenhof wasn’t a little frightened about having to make this scene a reality, as he also noted that “as cinematographer, I think, some of the scariest things you can read on a page are like, “A moonlit night,” because there is this balance of what’s real, and what feels real, and also what an audience wants to see, in terms of physically seeing a story being told.”

The night episode was the seventh in the series, which you can head to Prime Video and watch as and when you see fit today.