Journal Zero

Last month the Night Zero team took some time away from the zombie photographic comic book (check it out if you haven’t yet, here’s the first page!)–and produced a special homage to a new zombie video game, “Left 4 Dead“. Produced by the incredible team at Valve, the folks responsible for Half-Life, Counterstrike, Team Fortress, and Portal, this newest team-based shooter pits four survivors against hordes of the undead, in what is possibly the most brilliant execution of a zombie apocalypse game to date.

Unlike most modern games, where players can create their characters from a wide range of bodies, clothings, faces, and personalities, in Left 4 Dead there are only (and always the same) four survivors. This unusual design choice creates a unique play experience, as all players around the world become intimately familiar with these four characters—their voices, their mannerisms, they way they laugh and they way they panic. By forcing the millions of gamers to live as these four survivors, Valve has created a set of universal heroes, instantly recognizable to anyone who’s sat down with Left 4 Dead. Heroes that the team of Night Zero would sit down with as well, in our own special way.

Thanks to the wide networks of the Night Zero production team, getting a cast together that resembled the four characters was challenging but successful. Each of the survivors is very idiosyncratic and different, but none is beyond the everyday person, so pulling together costumes and props was no more difficult than any other Night Zero shoot. For a location with a range of backdrops and settings, we returned to the warehouse where the middle of Episode One was shot, and to match the game’s selection, we pulled together all the weaponry we could get our hands on.

If you’re not familiar with Left 4 Dead, I encourage you to first watch the opening cinematic, a delightful zombie flick in its own right, and a flawless introduction to every character and game element that makes Left 4 Dead so wonderful. Then, click on the image below to visit the Flickr gallery with our first batch of “fan art” photos.

These ten photos are just the first round, so keep your eyes out for another set in the next few weeks. Of course, this wouldn’t be a proper blog post without some behind the scenes photos, and boy have we got some great ones. Enjoy!

The greenroom, where guns and zombies and snacks collide

Francis getting psyched up

The witch getting her nails done

Zoey and Bill meet the witch

See how the hunter flies through the air...

...with a little help from the crew.

Even zombies need to a shoulder to lean on.

Startling the witch

Heading to the roof, where a safe room is being setup

Forest and Eli frame the shot

Like our stuff? Be sure to check out our post-apocalyptic zombie comic, done in the same style!

UPDATE: More behind-the-scenes info and photos are available on our second Left 5 Dead blog post.

As the publicist for Night Zero, I get the pleasure of introducing the book to many different people, and get to work with creators of podcasts, comic store owners, and editors and writers of various publications. It’s a blast to get to market a product that is so unique- not just a website, not just a comic book, not just photos, Night Zero: Volume One appeals to a wide range of people, and it’s been my job to find that audience and put the book in their hands.

Finding and advertising a product to an unknown audience is a difficult task, and I’ve gotten to be really creative with our marketing approaches, which has been a lot of fun. We’ve done various forms of online marketing, some guerilla and some more professional. I’ve also personally walked into all of the comic shops and bookstores that carry our book, Night Zero “Survivor Pack” slung over my shoulder.

We’ve received positive reviews in two different podcasts so far, and you can check out those episodes here:

The Webcomic Beacon

Seattle Geekly

We’ve also received positive feedback and support from a number of local comic and bookstores. If you would like to see Night Zero: Volume One in your favorite store, have the owner or manager email me (publicity at nightzero.com), and we’ll make sure we get some copies in there.

But one of my favorite marketing techniques is free stuff and branded merchandise. From the beginning, I knew I wanted us to get Night Zero shot glasses. The characters need alcohol to survive, so clearly it would be the perfect giveaway or trinket to sell! Thanks to my persistence, those of you who attended the launch party received a branded shotglass in the survivor pack. Those of you who missed out can purchase one at the Emerald City Comic-con. They’re big. And awesome. Another product I’ve been wanting to make for a while are Night Zero t-shirts. I specifically want one that says “Scratcher? I hardly know her!”, but I’m not sure how the rest of the production team feels about that design. If you’d be interested in a Night Zero t-shirt, send us an email, let us know. If you have an idea for a design for a Night Zero shirt- send it our way. If we use it, we’ll send you a couple of free shirts!

My focuses lately have been on two upcoming activities. The first is Emerald City Comic-con. Night Zero will be there both Saturday and Sunday, April 4 and 5. You can purchase your tickets at http://www.emeraldcitycomicon.com/tickets.php or at many of the comic shops that stock our book. We will have the coolest booth there, complete with free gore makeup and a chance to get your own HDR photo taken!

The second activity is a bit more on-going. Night Zero is currently looking to recruit a Marketing Intern. This intern will be in charge of a Night Zero street team, as well as other marketing projects that he/she and I see fit. If you are a college student who would be interested in earning some credits by working with the Night Zero team, send your resume to publicity at nightzero.com. We’ve already had some interested students apply, so get the resumes in quickly if you would like to be considered!

Overall, I’m excited to get to market a product that I enjoy so much, and hope that you enjoy it as well. Be on the lookout for some new marketing campaigns in the future- we’ve got some great stuff planned!

Episode Two is titled “Quarantine” for no subtle reason, and it was a blast producing this segment with everyone’s new favorite sleaze, Claude. He’s a fun character to work with, primarily because it’s our first chance to put Marion out of her element and change her stakes in the game. She can’t always be in control, although sometimes she still manages to get the upper hand…

The quarantine room is a rehearsal space in the Seattle Center run by the organization Theater Puget Sound, and it’s perfect for that gritty texture I wrote about last week. At casual glance it seems a fairly clean, though well-used facility, but throw it through tonemapping and every dirt stain appears, every crack deepens, and every scratch sharpens. Seeing the results of these photos led to more conscious selection of our future shoot locations: given a choice between similar options, we had new eyes to see how tonemapping could affect the atmosphere of the space.

This scene was the first shoot of Episode Two, and in addition to marking that obvious step forward, it also had two symbolic “firsts” for the Night Zero team. It was our first time using the three-point light kit, which gave us more control over our work, and it was our first shoot on a hired location, which was much easier to schedule and more efficient to shoot. Night Zero was moving up, past the hobby phase and now past the amateur endeavor into being a full-fledged production company. We even had fashionable “CREW” tees for the team to wear, earning the treasured title “redshirts.”

Shooting with a light kit requires a different approach to the shoot schedule, which complicates things for the talent as well as the production team. In practical lighting we would shoot sequentially, skipping forward when we had similar shots or as various cast members took breaks. But actors are easy to move and lights are hard, so a lit scene is shot based on lighting configurations. For the Claude sequence we were less prepared than we thought, and lost quite a bit of time with constant light changes, but it educated us on how to better work pre-production for our later shoots.

The updates were a little wonky this week due to international travel, but everything should be smooth sailing from now on. Don’t forget to grab your tickets to the Emerald City ComiCon that’s coming up, and if you haven’t yet picked up your copy of Night Zero: Volume One, now’s a great time. Stay safe from scratchers, and here are your photos.

Thus begins production of Episode Two

Bigger shoots require bigger guns

What a difference three lights make

Forest does a last check of his shots

Justin reviews his lines

Getting the talent into position

We're professionals. Don't try this at home.

No explanation needed

The office sequences that opened this episode were the last of what I refer to as “first phase” photography, back in the early stages of Night Zero production. When it was as much a learning experience and method experiment as it was an actual production, as we were slowly accumulating skills, knowledge, and equipment, we kept our flexibility high and our bulk low. With the exception of the warehouse fire sequence, the entirety of episode one was shot using natural (sun) and practical (what’s already present) lighting. The opening office scene, being a direct continuation of episode one, was the last to fall into this style, and while it was a learning experience, I’m happy that we have moved on to better things.

Since moving into episode two, we’ve done all our shoots with a three- or four-point light kit, which improves clarity as well as consistency. In episode one, 90% of the post-production work was tweaking and re-rendering the tonemapping to best match the surrounding frames. As the sun moved across the sky and clouds floated in and out, our light levels (and therefore exposure settings) were constantly shifting, yielding the optimum photos at each moment but a smorgasboard of levels to wade through.

With a larger production crew and photography assistants, we can control the the levels and balance of light on set. With controlled set lighting, we can shoot every photo at the same exposure settings, which astronomically improves the speed and consistency of our rendering.

Whenever we discuss lighting needs with photographers, they raise their eyebrows when we mention using a light-kit AND triple-exposure HDR photography. The implementation of HDR is most commonly used to balance lighting in unlightable environments, and the idea of shooting HDR on a fully lit set is perplexing. One of the biggest lessons we’ve discovered over the course of making Night Zero, though, pushes us in exactly the opposite direction: that only with both set lighting and triple exposures can we fully capture the look we love so much.

In the first six months of producing Night Zero, during the pilot and episode one, we were confused as to why some of our tonemapped photos came out with the vibrance and texture that is unique to our visual style, while others came out looking like “regular” photos. The same shoots, the same tonemap settings, completely different results. There is no How-To guide for HDR and tonemapping, and little to be found of others in the field attempting what we were, so it was only through much trial and experimentation that we discovered the trick to control the look we want.

When you shoot with a full light kit, a single exposure contains the right balance of information to properly render the photograph in a clean and sharp finish, much like anyone would expect to see from a professional shoot. When you shoot without a light kit but with triple-exposure HDR, tonemapping can use the information from the other exposures to compensate for the missing light information, and render a photograph of the same quality as the fully lit one.

Only when you shoot with both a full light kit and triple-exposure HDR can you render the tonemapped style that has come to define Night Zero. In this sense, the tonemapping can be viewed as a finite resource, and the lighting on the photo a scale. If the set is fully lit and properly exposed, the entire power of the tonemapping can be applied to enhancing the detail and vibrance. If the set is poorly lit and underexposed, the power of the tonemapping has to be spent bringing the photo up to par, and only what’s left over from that can be used to enhance. (Please note that this analogy does not work for the technology behind the HDR tonemapping, but sufficiently explains the results)

When we discovered this, we increased our focus on stronger lighting and consistency. Immediately our photos became sharper and more well defined. Our gritty, dirty environments popped with detail and precision. We locked down what we wanted, and now are able to focus our attention on environment detail, character development, and writing.