Video Shoot Sunlight Planner
See the whole shoot day as a colour-coded timeline — night, blue hour, golden hour, midday harsh light, and back again — with the exact times and a one-line guide for each phase.
How it works
The tool uses the NOAA solar-position algorithm to compute the sun's altitude across the whole day at your chosen location, then splits the 24 hours into consecutive light phases based on where the sun is: night, blue hour (twilight), golden hour (soft warm light), morning daylight, midday harsh (2 hours either side of solar noon), afternoon daylight, evening golden hour, evening blue hour, night again. Each segment is drawn to scale on the timeline bar — long summer days show a wide daylight band, short winter days show narrow bands with a big blue night stretch on either side.
How to use this tool
- Pick a city preset for accurate location + timezone, or enter your own coordinates. Or click Use my location to fill from your browser (requires permission).
- Pick the shoot date.
- Read the timeline top-to-bottom — colour and time tell you what to expect from the light at each hour.
- Plan your outdoor scenes around the golden and blue segments; move interviews and detail shots into midday when harsh sun is unforgiving.
- Copy the schedule and paste it into your call sheet or director's plan.
Frequently asked questions
Why is midday flagged as harsh?
When the sun is high overhead, light comes straight down — that produces deep shadows under eyes, noses and chins on people, and washes colour out of landscapes. It's the trickiest light to work with. If you can't move to golden hour, work in open shade, use a big diffuser overhead, or move indoors. The tool flags the ±2h window around solar noon as the harsh zone.
What if I need to shoot at midday anyway?
Overcast is your friend — clouds are a giant natural diffuser. Otherwise: shoot in open shade (under trees, next to a building's north side), use a large diffuser overhead, add fill light from below, and keep talent's chin slightly up so shadows fall away rather than pooling on their face.
How accurate is the timeline near the poles?
At extreme latitudes (above ~66°) some days have no true night, no true daylight, or no golden hour at all. The tool detects those cases and simply omits the missing phases from the bar — you'll see a mostly-day or mostly-night timeline. Times remain accurate for the events that do occur.
Does the timeline account for daylight saving?
Yes when you pick a city preset — those carry an IANA timezone, so DST transitions are automatic. For manually-entered coordinates the tool falls back to a longitude-based fixed offset (usually within 30 min); pick a city preset for the exact local clock time.
Where do the colour codes come from?
They roughly match how the sky looks during each phase: deep navy for night, cool blue for twilight, warm amber for golden hour, bright green-lime for daylight, and yellow-warm for the harsh midday band. The legend above the timeline confirms which colour maps to which phase.