A Claude for All Seasons
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
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