On shooting HDR on-location, without green screens or plates, and connecting non-connected rooms through framing and strategic cuts

If you live in the Seattle area, you can now pick up a copy of Night Zero: Volume One at any of these fine comic stores. Worldwide fans can purchase directly from us, or on Amazon.com.

This hallway sequence is visually one of my favorites from this episode, because of the great textures and details of the location. From the gritty brick wall to the Windows-screensaver-esque pipes on the ceiling, this is the kind of complex background that HDR really takes well to. The shooting space itself was not ideal, constrictive not just in being terribly narrow, but also in only having two electrical outlets in the span of the entire hallway. Rigging the lights and framing the shots wasn’t easy, but the sense of confinement clearly comes through, and I’m pleased with how the tone changes from the conference room to the basement.

The challenge of not using any green-screen or digital backgrounding is the need for us to find shootable locations for every sequence in the story. While illustrated comic artists have no restrictions on where their characters can go, we have to produce Night Zero from the mindset of a film crew, making adjustments to the action and dialogue to balance out what the writer first drafted and what the location scouts deem feasible. On the other hand, using still photography instead of motion film gives us the advantage of jumping from set to set and blending the locations together without having to actually show them connecting.

I’m reminded of the television show The West Wing, where the White House set was initially split between two locations with an identical hallway in each one. The camera could never show the characters walking from one half of the set to the other—they always had to cut in that hallway. Night Zero can have sets on opposite sides of town that act as adjacent rooms, blended seamlessly together with intuitive framing. While this is something we regularly plan for, it happens that this hallway and quarantine room are both in the same location—a theater rental space in the Seattle Center. The rooms are regularly used by local theater and improv groups as rehearsal spaces, and through special permission we were able to shoot this brief sequence in the hallway as well.

We’ve now got our first introduction to the peacekeepers, the closest thing to a military and police presence in the new world. They’re the second of the three major factions in this story (the messengers being the first), and are definitely the most expensive to suit up. In episode three we’ll meet the leaders of the squad, called the 151st, as well as their adversaries from the third faction.

In other news, the “characters” and “gallery” pages on nightzero.com have been merged and updated into a new “world” page, which will continue to grow with background information and supplemental materials about the world of Night Zero. New characters will be added to the page as they appear in the comic, two or three more this episode and a whole bunch in the next. The new gallery photos include art from episodes one, two, and three, so if you’re sensitive about possible spoilers, consider yourself warned.

On Monday I’ll be heading to Germany for a couple of weeks, but if all goes to plan the comic and blog updates will continue as scheduled. When I return we’ll be going right into our booth at the Emerald City ComiCon, and we hope to see many of you there.