Journal Zero

It’s my great pleasure to bring this brand-new vignette to the Night Zero community, and I hope you’ve been enjoying it. This flash into the past of the Nazarov girls is both groundbreaking and trend-bucking in many ways, which I’m happy to share with you today.

Immediately notable from the production side is the speed with which this vignette came to life. In early April the idea came to do a story about the sisters, and after a number of very different scenarios, the concept began to come together as you see it. Production was fast-tracked amidst a few large Episode Three shoots, a cast assembled from some incredibly talented local actors (who had been long waiting for such an opportunity), and then costumes, props, and a shoot location brought together in swift order.

The vignette is shot at the Galway Arms in the University District, a fabulous dive bar frequented by many of us local theater folk (because of its great happy-hour food and proximity to the Historic University Theater). Shooting began at 8am on a Monday morning so that we could wrap a full day’s work before the bar opened at 4pm. Light kits, cameras, coffee and doughnuts were loaded in, tables and chairs got rearranged for our setup, actors donned dapper costumes, and we jumped right to it. The goal for the seven-hour day (the first of three shoots for this story) was fifty-two photos, totalling fourteen pages (although further editing and trimming in post-production shaved that down to thirteen pages).

The primary motivation behind this story was to explore the relationship between Nadia and Dariya, who (along with their older brother Valentin) supervise and control the entire New City government. They appear on occasion in the serial story to balance the Marion/Claire plotline and provide some background exposition, but the serial arc just isn’t suited to really explore their complex history and difficult relationship. The sisters are deep and developed characters, their actors Jana and Alix talented and enthusiastic, and I wanted an opportunity to really get into their part of the Night Zero world.

From the start, I knew that the vignette should be in the past, to shrug off the weight of the serial story and have a completely clean slate from which to develop. I chose to focus on the weeks following the events of night zero, to explore the struggles faced in the creation and sustainment of this “new city”. The backstory of the post-apocalyptic society is far too detailed to fully explain in the serial story, and even too much for one vignette, but I wanted to lay down a few tidbits about how it all came together: the war against the scratchers, the death of their father Aleksandr, the formation of the Syndicate as a counter-power to the Nazarovs, and the tenuous relationship between the sisters, their brother, their citizens, and the rest of the survivors.

The brainstorming for the story itself inspired to a diversity of delightful and dangerous stories, two of which stand out as the foundations for what ultimately came to fruition. The first concept was a split narrative, to emphasize the contrast between the sisters (Nadia having left the family to avoid her father’s lifestyle, Dariya having been raised by it). On one side of the story, Nadia sits at dinner with Valentin and the two discuss their little sister’s role in the New City and how her youth and personality are both strategic and dangerous. On the other side of the story, Dariya is out on a negotiation that goes sour and takes matters into her own action-packed hands. This was a fun idea and would have been a creative endeavor, playing the back-and-forth of Nadia’s dialogue against Dariya’s blazing guns and swinging fists. However, this story did little to show the sisters’ relationship to each other and how they interact on a personal level, so the concept was set aside (but not forgotten).

The second major story idea put the sisters together and in the thick of it, in a concept that would have flexed our action muscles in challenging and uncharted ways. At the center of the action was a caravan, carrying the sisters, their military escort, and various diplomats and officials, which came under attack. Mobs of scratchers, intense firefights, exploding cars… this one had it all. The obvious technical challenges, however, made this less of a practical production prospect and more of a “what if” scenario, which was shelved (but eventually found its way back to the storyline).

After these two ideas came the basic premise from which the finished story stemmed: the two sisters, together, in the post-war period, trying to broker a peace between their society and those outside it. The early version had a much more dialogue-centric balance, with the sisters arriving at the speakeasy as diplomats, Dariya and Drake sparring with their finely-honed arguments. Like in the first concept, this storyline was to devolve from discussion to violence (in contradiction to the sisters’ hopes for a peaceful future), but this early draft had a more structured and dialogue-heavy “let’s sit at the table and debate” kind of mood. Interesting to read, but ultimately a little slow for what I wanted to produce.

At that point, I revisited the previous idea of the caravan attack and the car bombs, and found that to be a perfect setup for a quicker, high-stakes game of cat and mouse between the sisters and the forces outside their walls. No longer were they meeting Drake on equal terms—they were now hostages, ambushed and kidnapped yet still trying to make their case. Dariya was always to be the diplomat (because of her familiarity with her father’s work), while Nadia’s involvement fluctuated from draft to draft (you’ll see more of her in the coming pages, so I won’t spoil that right now). It was known early on that Drake and Aleksandr had a working relationship before night zero, but one relatively late change to the script was the clarification of that history and the explicit point that Drake has known the sisters personally for quite some time. This shift helped bring their two extreme viewpoints more to the center, and made a somewhat flat, strictly-evil Drake into a more rounded character with justifiable animosity and objections to what the Nazarovs were doing with Seattle.

So what we end up with, then, is a snapshot of the creation of the New City, the conflicts in the relationship between the Nazarov sisters, and some other fun and exciting stuff that I won’t spoil for you. The girls aren’t out of it yet, and things are about to get tough. Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Behind-the-Scenes Photos, Concepts & Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.