On shooting a cover for our self-published debut book

Things are picking up this week, both for the online serial (the stage is being set for the action yet to come) and the real-world production. Last weekend saw our final shoot for Volume One, being the cover shoot, and saw more scratchers and gore than we’ve tackled to date. It was a delightfully successful shoot, we met a nice group of new people who were very enthusiastic and fabulous as our zombies, and the cover for Volume One is definitely going to stand out when it hits bookstore shelves at the end of the year. I saw the first printed draft of the completed book this morning, and it is stunningly gorgeous (and heavy). I cannot emphasize enough how much stronger the HDR photography shows up on paper than on the computer screen.

The major challenge for the cover shoot was to composite an image that would scale to be full size, while shooting in dark lighting. The camera of Night Zero, a Canon Rebel XTi, has a full resolution of just over one single page, so taking a single photo for the cover would not have yielded a quality image. We instead shot the cover as a single photo for reference, then shot each element (actor) full-frame and digitally composited them together.

Running the gore for the cover shoot was the lovely miss Jana Healy, who did a wonderful job making the beautiful actors look their most gruesome best. Although a number of latex prosthetics were used to simulate burns and cuts, the most powerful and grisly gore was created with rolled up toilet paper and latex. I only wish the cover were bigger, so we could show more of the detail that went in to the shoot. Kristina, one of our scratchers for the day, posted a lovely review of the experience on her video blog.

Episode two continues it’s production this weekend with another photo shoot, so I’ll talk more about that next week. Until then, stay zombie safe.