Journal Zero

Regular blog readers are familiar with how the original concept for Night Zero was a series of semi-independent stories, with crossover casts and occasionally intermingling storylines. That idea was shelved in favor of the six-episode serial arc, but stayed alive in the form of the vignette. A way for the team to try out new techniques, cast new faces, and get a break from the day-to-day production of the serial comic, the vignette concept was that of low-overhead and low-expense productions, short shoot schedules, and quick turnarounds. “Jezebel” and the untitled vignette were both perfect examples of this, each being shot in two short sessions with minimal crew, the former costing less than $30 and the latter costing nearly nothing to produce.

When “Sisters” was developed this last April, it was supposed to follow suit. It was to be a short story, a quick production, and it was supposed to accomplish three things. First, I wanted to explore the personalities and relationship of Dariya and Nadia, who are very complex characters with unfortunately little screentime in the serial arc. Second, I wanted to flex our action muscles and see what we could do. The last time we shot a real “action” scene was the very first day of production on Episode One over a year ago, and the next time we’re scheduled to shoot will be in the middle of downtown Seattle with a cast and crew of nearly one hundred people. Naturally, I wanted to give the team a little bit of practice before then. And third, I wanted to get some up-close and personal time with our zombies, which also have relatively little screentime in the serial arc.

After nailing down the final plot of the Sisters vignette (discussed in a previous blog post), a shoot day was scheduled with the full cast. The script was nine pages and the story divided neatly into two half-days, so everything was coming along nicely until the storyboards began. It quickly became clear that there was too much story to produce in one day, even after a serious and extensive session of editing, consolidating, and cutting. The decision was made to split the production into two shoots: our already-scheduled date would cover the first act (Drake and his goons), and a following date would cover the second act (scratchers and the military). The Drake shoot was our first at the location and our first using the “shot card” method of production, but although we hit some delays and shot over schedule, we wrapped everything we wanted and were ready for the next one.

Unfortunately, storyboarding once again showed that we were trying to do too much, and that the “simple” story was not nearly as simple as it appeared on paper. Rather than forcing more cuts before production, I decided to again split the shoot: the scheduled second shoot would cover the sisters vs. henchmen plus the first scratcher attack, and a third shoot would wrap up with the second scratcher attack and Yevgeniy’s rescue. For flexibility, I chose to shoot the entire script as originally storyboarded and make cuts in post-production. Consolidating and slicing the assembled pages, another 10% was trimmed down from the finished work… but it was still incredibly long.

In addition to the three primary goals of the Sisters vignette, I was also using the production as a test bed for our comic’s visual style, pacing, and action/dialogue balance. Over the past year we’ve received some good feedback from readers about how Night Zero flows, and some of the more common impressions were that most scenes moved a bit slowly and could stand more action. Our most popular work to date, “Jezebel”, is often cited as well-balanced and quickly-paced story, and it was in that spirit that the first act of “Sisters” was produced. [In full disclosure: the original cut of Jezebel wasn't without its share of pacing problems, and it too got some heavy trimming (nearly 20% reduced) in post-production.]

The second act of “Sisters” was an experiment in sustained action sequences, and there should be no doubt that we learned something important: action sequences should NOT be sustained. In previous works, too much dialogue has prevented physical action from progressing, leading to a “talking heads” situation. In the second act of “Sisters”, too much action creates a disproportionate timeline, where a month’s worth of page updates covers less than a minute’s worth of story time. If I were to do it again, the two acts would be merged together for a constant switch-off between action and dialogue, smoothly blending from one to the other every 3-5 pages. We’d already shot and sequenced Episode Three before production on “Sisters” began, but I’ll be revisiting every panel and every page to retroactively apply some of our new understanding of pacing and plot progression. As we now kick into production of Episode Four, timing and balance will be at the top of our script and storyboard review process.

There is always a struggle for us to reconcile Night Zero as both a full-length graphic novel and a regularly-updated webcomic. Being the former, there are certain allowances for longer developments and extensive sequences, with the understanding that the reader will be presented with the entire work and may move at their desired pace without requiring a punchline on every page. But being the latter, there is pressure to make every single page independently significant and engaging, lest readers tire of waiting for updates. Towards the end of this vignette, we noticed a trend of visitors checking weekly and getting a three-page batch rather than checking for each update (our website has no advertisements or sponsors, so this behavior doesn’t negatively affect us like it would most comics). After “Sisters” concludes next week, we’ll be launching a redesign of our website that is better suited for visitors checking both daily and less-than-every-day. Of course, if you want to keep getting new pages and not worry about checking the site at all, I recommend you check out the RSS feed.

I hope you have enjoyed the “Sisters” vignette, and appreciate you sticking through to the lengthy end. I’m always appreciative of feedback from you, dear reader, so please take a moment to comment on this blog entry or send us an email with your thoughts on “Sisters”, other vignettes and the serial story, or anything else.

At our ever popular photo & makeup booths, I’m often asked, “Where did you learn to do this?” The short answer is always, “I’m a big Halloween dork.” The long answer is below.

I was always into theater and found myself the go-to girl for makeup effects as early as high school. I did basic aging back then with just trial and error. I took a stage makeup course as a theater major in college, which reinforced the basics of shadow and highlight that I’d already been doing, but didn’t get too much into special effects. I do love Halloween and look for any excuse to give myself a black eye or big goopy wound. Luckily I can do most of the effects on myself for experimentation. What I know now has come through home experimentation, lots of research and also doing a TON of zombie makeup. With the booths that we’ve done at Comicon, Crypticon, the Guinness record breaking Fremont Zombie Walk and the West Hollywood Zombie event, I can easily say that I’ve had the opportunity to do gore effects on hundreds of people in the last 6 months.

I think everyone on the Night Zero team would say they’ve learned much during the process of creating this photographic novel. Looking back at where we started, we are often amazed at how much has changed in how we approach nearly every aspect of production. I’ve found the process of designing and implementing makeup effects to be no different. What started as homemade blood and a squirt bottle has evolved into pre-planned detailed designs and prosthetic effects.

When you are involved in a project that has no model to refer to, no predecessor, the process has to be dynamic. For example, I learned the hard way that spending an hour on a three-dimensional gash effect has only minimal payoff in HDR, which by it’s nature, flattened out a good deal of the hard earned detail. It looked good, but it didn’t look 3-D. Now I know I can get a much quicker, and equally good looking, effect by using what the tone mapping process craves: highlight and shadow. And grit.

Night Zero loves a challenge, which has provided many unique makeup opportunities for me. When recreating the famous four from Left 4 Dead, I was blessed with very very good casting, but still had to make the effects as true to the game as possible (else face the wrath of the internet). I was very pleased with how the witch and hunter turned out. The biggest challenge of that shoot was Francis’ arm tattoos. I literally spent a week with tattoos on my own legs and arms, trying to come up with a technique that would be believable. I’m no visual artist, so did all I could to avoid freehand work. From carbon transfers and pre-made tattoo sleeves to specially made tattoo makeup and liquid eyeliner…I tried everything. I had several options available on the day of the shoot, including printouts of the actual tattoos from the actual game sized to fit a human arm. When it came down to it, all of that failed. The transfers were too light and the light projections uselessly warped. Francis had a bit more arm hair than me and none of the lines were taking. I wound up free-handing all of the tattoos with a sharpie and using rubbing alcohol on the ink to create shading. I have to say, it looked very very good in person. However, another hard lesson learned: the subtlety of the shading was lost once the HDR and tone mapping were put into play, and in the final photos it looked a little like…sharpie drawn free-hand.

Our most ambitious gory shoot to date involved two full zombies, two victims, a head wound, a gunshot wound, sweat and grit for five people, wet hair that didn’t dry in the hot lights and torn edible neck flesh. Since I was also an actor in that shoot, it involved much scheduling acrobatics for production, provided beautifully by our Assistant Director, Kelly Ota. Incidentally the torn flesh needed to be vegan friendly, as our lovely zombie for that day was vegan. After lots of research in the produce aisle, my kitchen experiments found eggplant to be a fleshy and ugly without much help. Adding a little corn syrup with thickener and coloring did the rest. I think it turned out completely disgusting and looked great in the photos. I love that about gore makeup—sometimes, the solution to a problem is a vegetable.

Looking forward, it’s becoming clear that our project is growing too big for me to continue handling on my own. We will be expanding our effects team to prepare for the hordes to come. Be sure to contact us at casting@nightzero.com if you have gore makeup experience and are in the Seattle area!