Originally shared by Martini_98

This is a great way to avoid "The next day" text transitions in your story.

 

Here's how you do it!

1. You’ll need:

  • 2 different overlays of what you want to have in the front - In my case it’s a forest.
    A night and day version of it.

  • Sun overlay

  • Sunrise sky overlay

  • Night sky overlay
    For optimal result I recommend having it bigger than the usual 640x1136px and also with a gradient of daylight at them bottom. Something like this:

 

  • Day sky background

I recommend having your overlays already in the size 640x1136 so that you won’t have to spot directing them. (Except for the sun and night sky, as they will be moving)

2. Place the overlays:
Bottom ‘layer’ is your day sky background.
Layer 0 - sunrise sky
Layer 1 - night sky
Layer 2 - sun
Layer 3 - day version of your scenery (forest)
Layer 4 - night version of your scenery

It should look something like this:

INT. DAYLIGHT SKY - DAY with SUNRISE SKY at layer 0 with NIGHT SKY at layer 1 with SUN at layer 2 with FOREST DAY at layer 3 with FOREST NIGHT at layer 4

Place the night sky overlay so that you cannot see the daylight at the bottom.
Place the sun behind your scenery overlays, so that you can’t see it.

4.

So basically, all your ‘night stuff’ is at top and goes to ‘day stuff’ to the bottom. Pretty much all you do is fading all the overlays one after another.

Your sun overlay starts to move first, so that the sky can change meanwhile.
Then your night sky starts moving up and fading at the same time (shifting faster than fading). Meanwhile your night scenery overlay fades. Finally, your sun rise sky fades.

Code Template:

&overlay SUN shifts to x y in a
@overlay NIGHT SKY shifts to x y in b AND overlay NIGHT SKY opacity 0 in c AND overlay FOREST NIGHT opacity 0 in c THEN overlay SUNRISE SKY opacity 0 in d

a - amount of time you want the scene to last
b - 1/2 a
c - a little longer than b
d - 1/2 b

Sorry for the way I wrote it, just wanted to make it professional :nerd_face:

This is how I coded my scene, for reference:

INT. DAYLIGHT SKY - DAY with SUNRISE SKY at layer 0 with NIGHT SKY to 1 -278 0 in zone 1 at layer 1 with SUN to 1.504 -87 120 in zone 1 at layer 2 with FOREST DAY at layer 3 with FOREST NIGHT at layer 4

@pause for 0.6

&overlay SUN shifts to 247 498 in 12
@overlay NIGHT SKY shifts to -709 333 in 6 AND overlay NIGHT SKY opacity 0 in 8 AND overlay FOREST NIGHT opacity 0 in 8 THEN overlay SUNRISE SKY opacity 0 in 4