Journal Zero

Well, they made it through. We’ve finished up the meat of the Episode One story, and the next week and a half will cover the ‘epilogue’ that sets the stage for the rest of the series. So in a way, we’re really just now getting to the good stuff. As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, Episode Two is nearly complete with production, and we’re underway with the pre-production work on Episode Three. But just to mix things up a bit, we’re pursuing a few side projects in the winter lull, exploring new areas of our creativity and expression.

One of the ways we’ll be keeping the website fresh and interesting during the off-season (about a month between the end of Episode One and the beginning of Episode Two) is with other stories from the Night Zero world. We’ve already got some stories and photos from the book that we’ll be sharing with you, and our camera-man Forest Gibson is set to helm the production of a new vignette. Directed and shot in the “white space” between our regularly scheduled productions, this will be a short, independent story that’ll go online right around Christmas.

It’s important to all of us at Night Zero to focus on the world beyond the primary comic serial, not just to mantain our sanity but primarily to show that the world of the post-apocalypse is as diverse as it is different. There is drama, comedy, love, and tragedy, and so much more than we could ever fit into our plot-driven primary story. Through short stories, vignettes, solo photos, journals, and other works, we’re creating a broad cross-section of the survivors’ society, and I look forward to sharing it with you over the next few weeks.

To flex our muscles in a different arena, our fabulous writer Alexander JL Theoharis drafted a short script to produce as a guest comic for our friends at Geist Panik. It’s a cute little comic about a ghost-hunting gal and her consortium of characters, pretty new but with a strong following. It’ll be off the air for a while next month, so we jumped at the opportunity to produce a Night Zero-style comic as a guest strip. With a new actor (the lovely Holly Nichols), different settings, and fun ghosty special effects, in a single evening we produced a full comic page of delightfully quirky, zombie-free fun. I’ll let you know when that’s published at the Geist Panik website. And yes, that is Mr. Gibson as the ghost.

Hard to believe we’ve been running the comic for three months already, and we’re just getting started. If you’ve had half as much fun reading the comic as we’ve had producing it, well, then we’ve had twice as much fun as you. And remember, we love to hear what you think of the comic, so head on over to the Night Zero contact page and give us a shout!

Stay safe and watch for signs of infection. See you next week.

...and the lovely Katrina Hamilton.

The happy couple.

Asst. Director Kelly Ota brings smiles to the set.

...while Forest takes a new myspace photo.

I’ve never been a fan of the (now standard) practice of “phoning in” set locations, props, and visual elements. Most likely coming from my theater background, when everything has to be real, I cannot stand when films opt for the easy, cheap solution of standing actors in front of green screens and faking everything else. While a film like Jurassic Park or Lord of the Rings benefits tremendously from the investment of shooting on-location, films like (the new) Star Wars and 300 come off as cheap hacks. I give credit to the actors that can manage to act in a bright green void, but loathe the directors and producers who take that cop out.

With Night Zero, I insist that all of our shoots be on location, all of our costumes and props real, all of our actors in the moment. Nothing in Night Zero is on a green screen, and we rely on post-production only for things that are impossible to shoot in HDR– splattering blood, for example, which would not hold still for three exposures. Action sequences are staged stationary, and given blur and speed-line enhancements to indicate motion. And sometimes, shots are broken up into multiple elements, to split focus between multiple entities.

In trying to keep our shoots low-impact, we opt for light gear that focuses on a small, personal area, rather than covering a huge space. This makes our shoots more flexible and a bit quicker, but can leave us vulnerable to larger problems, such as we faced when shooting this week’s action sequence. And by larger problems, I mean the sun.

If you can work it, the sun is an excellent light source. It generates strong ambient lighting, can be diffused and reflected, and doesn’t require a power source. Unfortunately, when you have two or three actors in different places, and are using light gear for small areas, it’s not so easy to light them all consistently. At least, not all at the same time.

Split photography is something we do with Night Zero a lot, normally when we have two characters at different depths that we want to keep in focus. On this shoot, it was essential to break the photos into separate targets for Katrina & Tamara separately, not just to get full-focus, but to be able to diffuse and light them both similarly.

Foreground shot, Katrina lit & focused. You can see the glare and shadowing on Tamara, who is in direct sunlight.

Background shot, Tamara lit & focused. She is now diffused, as Katrina was previously. When combined, these shots put them in the same environment with the same light.

With this method, we can have a more comic-book look, with everything in focus, or more film look, with a specific focus. Having the ability to choose which one we use means that in Night Zero, focus is an artistic decision rather than a limit of technology.

Single shot, one focus. This direct contrast to the previous frame throws the focus to Katrina, emphasizing her expression and setting the tone for the next page.

Sometimes people will do a double-take when they see Night Zero photos, convinced that we’re cheating or green-screening to get the images as sharp as we have. In reality, it’s that people are accustomed to seeing photographs with a limited depth of field, and when a photograph violates the laws of the lens, it can be startling. Comic books are always in focus, but the brain isn’t bothered because illustrations don’t follow the same rules as photos. Amusingly, the exact opposite focus can be done to trick the brain in a technique called tilt-shift miniature.

Episode One will be wrapping up in the next few weeks, but don’t worry. We’ve got some special surprises to keep you satisfied until Episode Two premieres in January.

Noah, the zombie Jesus

Even terror can be funny

It's a grisly business

Forest shows Tamara the shots

Zombie Jesus rises to feast on the flesh of the living. Or maybe he's a vampire.

Thankfully, Tamara is here to save the day.

...after a little instruction from yours truly.

We have two types of blood-- one tastes of mint, the other of chocolate. Katrina's got 'em both.

As promised, a little action and a little blood. These sorts of sequences are by far the hardest to coordinate and the hardest to produce, but they sure are a blast. Over the past year of creating Night Zero, we’ve shot four large-scale scratcher fight sequences, and those have been some of the most fun times we’ve had. From a freezing night in January to a scorching cloudless day in July, our scratchers have been real troopers, and I cannot emphasize enough how much they rock.

This week we upgraded to Photoshop CS4, primarily for its 64-bit compatibility. Previous versions of Photoshop (and most software) are only capable of understanding up to 4 gigs of memory, which is way more than most people would ever need, but is a difficult limitation for Night Zero. I’m a huge advocate of data redundancy and non-destructive editing, so every iteration of our photos is self-contained. The major advantage here is that nothing is permanent, and any change or alteration we make can be reversed at any time, without undoing everything that happened after the change. The disadvantage is that every progressive file contains all the data of all the previous files.

For example, a typical HDR photo (composited from three exposures) would be ~80MB as a destructable file, but ~450MB as a non-destructable photo. Take a multi-layered shot, which features a foreground photo, a background photo, and a matte background, and blend the three together. A destructable file, containing just a snapshot of the blend, would be ~200MB. A non-destructable photo, containing the full information of the three source files, plus all the information about how they are blended, weighs in at ~1.2 gigabytes. Add in a few dozen megs’ worth of special effects, and we’ve completed a single frame… one of five on a page. As you can see, we deal with monstrous amounts of data, and being free of the 32-bit RAM cap will be a boon to our post-production speeds.

Also this week we finished up another major shoot of Episode II, and have scheduled out the remainder of the episode over the next few weeks (with the exception of the final page, which will be shot as part of Episode III). Although this next episode will be completed by the time Episode I finishes its online run (mid-December), Episode II will not begin immediately afterwords. For one, what’s the point of “to be continued” if it’s continued immediately? And for two, next month is going to be our big crunch-time for distributing and marketing the book, Night Zero Volume One, and we don’t want to rush production and potentially sacrifice quality of either the book or the online release of Episode II. Don’t worry, we’ll find fun and interesting updates to keep you entertained, and start the Episode II run as soon as we feel the time is right.

Anybody interested in a more visceral zombie-apocalypse experience, I encourage you to check out the upcoming video game “Left 4 Dead” (due out Nov 18). From the producers of Half-Life 2 and Counterstrike, the ultimate zombie survival game. I picked up the demo last night and it blew me away, in a ferociously terrifying and entertaining way. Check out the TV spot for a quick peek at the beauty, or the Opening Video for five satisfying minutes of apocalyptic action.

And now, the reason you’re really here. Photos!

Jon and Shannon, the happy scratchers.

The satellite dishes were not the most photogenic set pieces...

Shannon and Tamara get into the scene, while Jon adjusts himself

Perks of the job.

Giving the cast the day's rundown

Noah, aka Zombie Jesus, getting into makeup

Forest Gibson, skeptical photographer

Me prepping Noah for his big debut

Tamara and Katrina, waiting for a fight

For this shot, Tamara supported Katrina so she could be "falling" backwards after the hit.

We didn't add the gun in post, we removed my hands holding it.

Continuing last week’s discussion on zombies and Night Zero, I’d like to explore how we moved from “zombies” to “scratchers”, how that’s different, and what it means for the survivors of our apocalypse.

A classic quirk of classic zombie films is that the characters never actually utter the word “zombie” in the course of the film, but the term is universally understood by the audience and the production team. For Night Zero, the word “zombie” carried with it a number of connotations that we wanted to separate ourselves from, which challenged us to stop referring to our infected as zombies and start calling them something new… scratchers.

For what is a zombie? A zombie is mindless, senseless, devoid of any and all cognitive function. Until recently, a zombie was slow, sluggish, and dead. A zombie is a threat much in the way an avalanche is– it’s not coming after you specifically, and doesn’t care what you do, but if you don’t get out of the way, things will end badly for you.

The first step to transform the zombie, as I mentioned briefly last week, is to shift from a living-dead style to an infection style. This change allows the creatures to retain the agility and dynamic of their former selves, presenting a much more dangerous threat at the cost of a (slightly) less pervasive one.

The second step towards the scratchers is to shift some of the brain-vacancy to a pack mind, adding intelligence and logic to a previously dumb-as-nails threat. What better way to balance the speed and agility of the infected than to give them hunting packs, ambush tactics, and the ability to learn and remember. Suddenly, the apocalyptic threat becomes less like toxic cattle and more like velociraptors.

Purists will then argue that the creatures in Night Zero are not zombies at all, and to a certain extent that’s true, and that’s exactly what we’re going for. When you think of the threat faced by the survivors, don’t think of the shopping mall from Dawn of the Dead. Think of the Reavers from the Firefly series (and film Serenity).

And much like Joss Whedon’s approach with Reavers in the Firefly series, the scratchers of Night Zero are not the focal point of the story, nor even a large percentage of it. They are the mechanism that sets the story in place, and they are the constant threat banging on the walls of the tenuous remnants of society. They are always there, yet rarely seen.

But when they are seen, count on it getting ugly.

See you next week!