Journal Zero

So, there you have it. The final page of Episode Two, which coincidentally is our 100th update– a notable milestone for any online comic. Technically it’s not our 100th page because of the numerous two-page spreads, but I’ll take it either way. Coming up for June is a new zombie-filled vignette that’ll play with some new narrative and visual styles, so I look forward to putting those out for you to see and comment on.

These last few pages have been the first real-time montage that we’ve attempted, and aside from the way it draws out over our update schedule, I quite like the effect. In Episode One we did a couple of flashback montages, which I suppose would be more accurately defined as collages because they were designed to establish a past, not progress time and action forward.

The most fun part about shooting a montage like this (or a collage like Episode One) is the instant gratification that comes with the production of it. Regular scenes have to be edited, revised, storyboarded, blocked, sequenced, and scheduled across the full cast and crew before they can be shot. The Claire montage required a director, a photographer, the actor, and a car. It was a marathon of great photography.

It was a Saturday afternoon that we shot the montage, the weather was perfectly generic and the crew already assembled from a morning shoot. We had just finished up on location for the “teaser” shots of Claude asleep at his desk, and as the crew packed up and headed out, Eli stuck around and Tamara arrived. Together, we hopped into Eli’s car and drove down towards south Seattle, where the visuals are just what we want.

We’d drive down a dusty industrial street and someone would see a cool building or epic backdrop. We’d park the car, hop out with the camera, and within a matter of minutes frame, block, snap, and be back in the car, looking for our next spot. There were more great shots than we could hope to use, and dozens more great locations that we could have shot, but I had to keep in mind that a regular comic montage would take weeks to release on our website. I put my favorite photos onto a two-page spread to get them out all at the same time, and trimmed down the end of the montage to blend it in with the house approach. Still two weeks’ worth of updates, but the grand visual impression is very much worth it.

The wall of the New City was not something we were planning to address at this point in the story, due to scope and resource concerns, but during our driving adventure we came across a perfect emulation of just what parts of the wall would be. It’s called the Marginal Way Skate Park, and it’s a home-made skateboard part built underneath the Marginal Way bridge by the stadia. The ramps and pipes of the park are fabricated from old wooden boards, built into a mass of dirt and rubble. The form is held together by a simple wall of stacked cinder blocks and rebar, standing 10 feet tall and reinforced with packed dirt on the back. We pulled the car over and stepped inside to check it out, and just like that, we had our wall.

Thanks to the guerilla-style approach to the montage shoot, there are sadly no behind-the-scenes photos to share with you, but we’ll be back next week with some fun ones. Don’t forget to grab your tickets to Crypticon, Seattle’s own horror convention, next weekend (June 5-7). We’ll have our booth setup with free gore makeup, free HDR photos, and plenty of cast and crew members to talk to you about becoming involved with Night Zero.

Last weekend was a heavy-hitting event for the Night Zero team, my apologies for not updating the blog. We spent three days shooting a location from episode three that covers seven different sequences over the span of the episode, for a whopping total of 149 panels. To put that in perspective, the entire first episode of Night Zero is 185 panels.

We do all our shooting around the city of Seattle, in both public and private locations. Last week’s pages, with the messenger girls escaping the quarantine building, was our first chance to get down and dirty in the middle of the city. Our local readers will probably recognize the downtown alleyway, which runs parallel to 5th & 6th Avenues, between Pike & Pine Streets. To those who aren’t local, just know that we are in the heart of the Seattle shopping district.

A shoot like this always begins with a permit, provided by the wonderful Chris Swenson at the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Film + Music. Our assistant director Kelly Ota coordinates the actors schedules and puts together a shooting plot, which becomes the framework for the master film permit. A detailed description of the shoot, the cast/crew size, our props and activities, and our on/off schedule accompanies a detailed map of the area, and a check for $25. In about a week, we receive our master permit, which includes any special instructions from the Seattle Police Department, the Fire Department, or any other civil offices who might be impacted by our shoot.

Large-scale shoots, the kind that warrant closing down streets and pedestrian control, require a proportional amount of police presence to supervise such activity. Any shoots involving weapons, regardless of whether they are props or not, also require police supervision. That’s all stuff we’ll be doing later on this year, and are very excited for, but shoot in question we wanted to keep low-profile. The first way to minimize our impact was to shoot our three “doorway” frames, weapon included, in a separate, private location, and color-match the environment to blend with the downtown backdrop. With some sneaky framing and editing, the scene flows smoothly without ever having a gun prop in the alleyway.

The second way to minimize our impact is to shoot very early on a Sunday morning. Aside from the occasional hobo, the pedestrian and vehicle traffic was sparse enough to allow us full shooting freedom, and in the random situations where someone walked across our background, we’d just hold for a few seconds and take the shot again.

With a small cast, skeleton crew, and Kelly supervising our progress against the storyboards, what could have been an onerous shoot was over before we knew it. The rich textures and detailed backgrounds, exactly the reason I had chosen that alley, came out beautifully in HDR. The pacing of the scene is great, one of our first plays with using silence as tension (oh so briefly), and I’m really pleased with how well the actors brought it all together.

The final shot was done by the infamous Eli Black-Mizuta, who dropped by at the end of the shoot with his fisheye lens and penchant for raising his camera to dangerous heights. Photoshop includes some tools to compensate for the fisheye distortion, but these only can do so much, which leaves the image with a slight bow outwards. Not something that you would find in an illustrated comic, but it certainly adds to the feel of the frame.

Next week, all the dirty details on the montage going on now. Don’t forget to check us out at the Seattle Crypticon horror convention in two weeks, and keep that zombie survival gear handy. You never know…

Shoot location was half a block from Starbucks. Perfect planning for an early-morning endeavor.

Always have a copy of the film permit on set with you. And always have an assistant director as great as this one.

The girls were a little chilly, so they kept their jackets on while we framed shots

The shoot was bare-bones and the weather overcast, so there were no reflectors on-set. Kelly steps in with her notebook.

Even pressing the shutter button on the camera causes movement that upsets the HDR exposures. We use a little red button to activate the shutter instead.

The button also makes shots like this a little more comfortable

The directors at work

Eli with a big lens, plotting his next move

I’m Eli Black-Mizuta, occasionally seen here as a backup cameraman, behind-the-scenes photographer, and dead body.

I went to Night Zero’s first general recruitment meeting, and was amazed at the amount of work already done on the project. I remember making a vague offer to help at that point, but never really followed up on it. My first introduction to the Night Zero operation was as an extra. There was a call for anyone with a car to come to the shoot for the first scene of Episode 1. We made a traffic jam and played dead bodies… good times.

The amount of organization and energy on the set really impressed me. Being a photographer, I brought my Nikon D50 along and shot some behind-the-scenes pictures between takes, primarily with a Sigma 28mm f/1.8, which I had just gotten (and highly recommend).

At the next shoot (the one running this week), I was asked along specifically to act as a production assistant and behind the scenes photographer. It was in a classic downtown office, with great light from the windows. When there wasn’t much action going on I took advantage of the lighting to shoot some more artistic pictures. I think a couple of these even made it into the book. I had just picked up a Tokina 10-17mm fisheye lens, but again the bulk of the shots were done with primes - the Sigma 28mm f/1.8 and Nikon 50mm f/1.8.

By the time the basement scene rolled around, the Nikon D90 had been released, which I snapped up for its faster burst speed, bigger screen, and better capture resolution. In the cramped space, I did most of my shots with a Sigma 10-20mm f/4.5-5.6. including the wide shot of the room that was eventually used as the establishing shot for that scene.

In February, Forest took a shot at directing a scene, and needed a photographer to fill in for, well, himself. I haven’t done a lot of shooting on sets, so I jumped at the opportunity to do a full shoot as the primary photographer. It was a lot of work, but I was able to bring some technology and skills to to the table that I think helped the shoot go smoothly. I used a portable DVD player as a live monitor from the camera, allowing the director to direct without actually being behind the camera (which was impossible on overhead shots), and letting the cast see what we were looking at, which can be useful when trying to position people.

I was used to the battery in my D50 lasting a month between charges, and was surprised when I went through two batteries and a backup pack of AAs during the shoot. Apparently Live View takes a lot of battery power to maintain. The MB-D80, with its AA batty pack proved invaluable here, as I could just keep popping in disposable batteries. The next day I ordered two more batteries. Live and learn.

I got another chance to do primary photography a couple of weeks later, when we shot part of Claire’s flashback scene at Gasworks Park. The picture of downtown Seattle is a composite of eighteen photos, all shot on location. Five shots of the background (in HDR, so 3 exposures each) to get enough open water to remove all of the boats, and three for the foreground of Claire and Edge looking across the water. It’s hard to see, but I destroyed all of the boats in the harbor, and added some cracks and weathering to the buildings. It was shot with natural light, and a Nikon 70-300m f/4.5-5.6. The purpose of the telephoto lens was to compress the picture a little, and make the skyline seem closer. Here’s the uncropped version:

Working on Night Zero has been a fascinating experience. With luck I’ll be providing behind the scenes photos (and maybe some primary camera work) for some time to come. I might even write another blog post someday.

Visually, the boiler room sequence is one of my favorite scenes we’ve shot to date. The HDR tonemapping style tends to make our characters look somewhat gritty and dirty all the time, but getting on location with grime and dust and crawling on the floor with it… well, you can see what that turns into.

This sequence was shot in the basement of a local ministry house near the University of Washington. We cleared out the chairs, lawn equipment, and miscellaneous supplies they regularly store in there, but left the dust and dirt as it was. What you see in the scene is the authentic effect of the two girls being in the room, with no dirt makeup or forced application. Katrina and Tamara were troopers the whole way through, getting down and dirty and really playing the scene with the fabulous location they were in.

This came at the end of an already long shoot day last December, after we finished shooting the flashback and escape sequences in the quarantine room. It was also our last shoot with Alexandra as the production manager/safety supervisor, before she headed back to school for her medical degree. I was directing and Forest was on photography, with Eli doing photography support and Justin on production assistance.

Earlier script editions had this scene’s conversation take place while the two messengers were crawling inside the venting, done with side-shots as they moved through, but this look was scrapped because (1) air ducts are a terrible place to have a conversation in a building you’re trying to escape from unnoticed, and (2) the boiler room location was too much fun for us to waste on just a couple of exit shots. So we moved the dialogue to the room, filling in over Marion’s searching, and pieced together the scene as it looks today.

The greatest fun in this shoot was creating the illusion of the girls coming out of a ventilation system without actually having to get them in one. From a production standpoint, we are not a comic book, we are a film, so we turned to the techniques that films and television shows use to create such illusions, and did just the same thing. Thanks to the brain’s implicit desire to make sense of things, all we needed to do was create a sequence of images that naturally suggested the girls coming out of the vent, and the reader’s mind would fill in the rest.

The first shot is Marion’s hand coming into view, to establish her location in relation to the vents. It was important to have the vent and her hand in the shot, but we could crop the rest. This was achieved by placing Katrina sitting up by the vent, her head and shoulders inside, and positioning the camera to catch her arm coming out of it.

The second shot is Marion coming headfirst into view, to establish her orientation in the room and clarify who’s hand we saw in the previous frame. Marion is the important part, not the vent, so this shot was done with Katrina held upside-down in front of a blank wall (matching the wall under the vent). Not an easy feat, especially for three-exposure HDR, but nothing the Night Zero team would shirk away from.

The final shot glues the previous two together, by establishing Marion in relation to the room and the vent, at the same time. At this point the sequence of events becomes clear and the reader moves right along, while Katrina never has to be inverted and fully inside of an air duct. Follow up with a  shot of Tamara tumbling out, and the whole action moves along seamlessly. From then on, just revel in the beauty of the room and get the characters moving again.

Giving the rundown for the shoot

Me showing Katrina how to position inside the vent for the "hand reveal" shot

Forest frames the "hand reveal" shot

Alexandra gives some safety pointers before Katrina goes in headfirst

Katrina finds her way into the dusty old vent

Yup... that's how we did it.

Tamara in good spirits, even when on the floor and in a vent

Eli mixes it up with a shot from above

Directors and co-creators on the job

In other news, Night Zero will be holding a booth at this year’s Crypticon Horror Convention, June 5-7 at the Seattle Center, so get your tickets now and come see us. We’ll be doing free photos and makeup just like at the ComiCon, and would love to chat with you about involvement in the project. We will also be doing some substantial work in collaboration with the Fremont Outdoor Movies this year for some zombie-themed summer fun, and we’ll be keeping you posted as more information is available. And finally, this may be old news to some of you, but an independent zombie short was sent my way the other day and I just fell in love with it, so if you’ve got a few minutes, head over and check out the film “I Love Sarah Jane“.