Getting Dirty
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“.