Journal Zero

Night Zero: Episode One officially premieres next Monday, September 8th, at http://www.nightzero.com.

It’s been a long road to get to this point, and we’re only just now getting started. I took advantage of the holiday weekend to put some more hours into the post work of episode one, touching up ten of the forty-three total pages. Unlike the HDR rendering, which is fairly consistent across the board, touchup work times are impossible to gauge because so many factors are in play. How many photos composite the frame, what the lighting conditions were, whether there was background wind or shadowing, and how still the actors posed– each of these affects the nature and scope of the touchup job.

In the best of conditions, a little color tweaking and blending is all that’s needed, and a photo can get its final touches in twenty minutes or so. In the more common conditions, there’ a good bit of HDR ghosting and layer compositing to clean up, which can run anywhere from forty to ninety minutes per frame. In the toughest jobs, a single frame’s touchup can take up to three hours. And episode one has over one hundred and fifty frames.

So there’s a lot of work to put in yet, but what’s a few hundred more hours compared to the thousands and thousands already committed by the Night Zero team? The finished pages are, in a word, gorgeous, and are worth every second we put into them.

I’ll be out of town for the rest of this week but back in time to release the first page. It’ll appear on the Night Zero website on Monday evening, and there will be an RSS feed to notify you of all the new pages (if you’d like).

The sign for Calico Ghost town after sundown

Hello, I am Forest Gibson and I am the co-creator/director of photography of Night Zero. I will be posting some of the blogs with how the project is coming along as well as fun behind the scenes photos and stories!

I just recently got back from my Night Zero promotional trip down through Oregon, California and Nevada. On the way to Las Vegas I stayed a night in a tiny little cabin in Calico Ghost Town, which was less real ghost town and more Disney’s Frontier Land (but in the Mojave desert and with no rides). It did make me thankful for the mild temperatures of the Pacific Northwest though– if there wasn’t electricity to power the little air conditioner attached to the side of my cabin, I don’t know how I would have (comfortably) survived the 110 degree weather! It just makes me remember how thin the veil of our high technology society is and how the loss of electricity would send things back to the way they were when this mining town was first founded: sweaty.

All in all things on the trip went well. Alexandra Larsson, our production manager, was with me for part of the trip and we ended up going to many different comic shops in Nevada and California. Some shops were extremely excited to hear about a new Photographic novel coming out, others told us to put our promotional material by the door and get out. The best experience we had was at a place we (randomly) found called Alternate Reality Comics. We went in and as soon as we mentioned we were producing a photographic novel, the owner perked up with attention and start chatting with us about it. On top of that, we attracted the attention of one of the regulars who likes to follow photographic novels. We talked with both of them for a while and ended up leaving the shop with both of their cards and photographic novel called Dorothy, which we hadn’t heard of before.

Because of the trip, it has been awhile since I have been able to focus on the production side of Episode One. Now that I am back, Anthony and I are going to grab some energy drinks, link up our computers, and start the long and arduous job of editing. For Night Zero, even some of the simplest photo editing can be time consuming. We are dealing with huge files that push our computers to the limit: the fact that we consider Photoshop’s limit of 4 gigs of RAM a major limitation, should give you a good idea of what I am talking about.

Night Zero is in a new phase right now, where we put our recurring schedule plan to the test. In the month of August there is no production– it is the post-production of Episode One and the pre-production of Episode Two, the former of which will be released and the latter of which will be produced in September. There is a new kind of energy here, a combination of excitement (from being so close to completion of our first episode), confidence (from approaching the second episode with experience and new knowledge), and just a bit of uncertainty (of the pending release of a product unlike anything ever done). Suffice to say, there is much to do.

This morning our Director of Photography, Forest Gibson, began a week-long roadtrip to promote Night Zero in comic shops and bookstores down the West Coast. Word of mouth and face-to-face are very important elements in promoting Night Zero, because the unique production tends to lead to a lot of questions. In promoting the comic locally around Seattle, we’ve found that the more people have a chance to discuss, the more excited they get. For this reason, much of our marketing and advertising in the coming months is going to be done on the streets and in the bookstores, moreso than in website ads and flyers.

The post-production of Episode One is coming along very nicely, and there are some gorgeous photos that I’ll be adding to the gallery soon. They can’t be uploaded until they receive the full suite of editing work, and right now we’re concentrating on doing the entire book, one process at a time, instead of the entire process, one photo at a time. But don’t worry, they will be ready soon, and well worth the wait.

Hello, and welcome to Night Zero. My name is Anthony van Winkle, I’m the creator/director of the project, and one of the production team members that will be keeping this blog updated with news from the world of the post-apocalypse.

We have finished principle photography for the first episode of the comic book, entitled “Ashes”, and are moving forward with post-production. What does that mean for a photographic novel?

1. The hundreds of shots taken over the past two months are laid out onto page templates where their storyboards once sat, arranged and cropped to best suit the action of the scene and the imagery of the page.
2. One by one, the three identical photos that make up each shot are rendered into High-Dynamic-Range (HDR) photos and run through a gambit of processing effects to create the unique visual style we desire.
3. Each rendered photo is then inspected and cleaned up, special effects are added, and the frames are polished for a consistent look.
4. The layout photos are replaced with the finished renderings and tweaked as necessary. Text bubbles and transition effects are added, and the entire proof is reviewed.

One page at a time, the comic is posted on nightzero.com, every Monday/Wednesday/Friday. The first episode will begin in September, but until then our pilot episode is available in its entirety at http://www.nightzero.com/episodes.html.