Lighting Vehicles - How to light in darkness?

[Tylerb]

I'm planning on shooting a car travelling down a road at night. It's a country road, and the only light I would be naturally getting is from the moon and the car headlights. It will be tracking, so the camera will be on a car following in front of the car being filmed.

How do I light the car while keeping a convincing scene? I can't imagine being able to shine some lights at it because then there will be obvious light sources on a country road, where there are no light sources.

Off the top of my head I could somehow get a powerful light up high with a blue filter replicating moon light. Apart from that, I'm stuck for ideas.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Unless you can afford a very large light on a very high condor crane, or a couple, hopefully on a bit of a rise or hilltop... you aren't going to be able to backlight a whole road at night. You could try a series of side-lights, maybe with a black flag on the camera side if you start to see the deeper lights as you travel down the road, but even those should be high up on a hill or something, and bright enough to be far back from the road.

You may want to consider doing the shot at late twilight when there is still some blue-ish light on the road from the sky.