Journal Zero

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“.