Journal Zero

I’m very pleased that not only did the Nadia/Valentin interlude come in at a tight three pages, but also that those three pages lined up within the same week of updates. Coordinating page content with upload dates is hard to do, and most of the times (like this week) when it happens, it’s strictly coincidental.

Designing and shooting these two scenes was an opportunity to switch up our routines, as much on the page as on the set. Placing Nadia outside in the night and Valentin inside his lair naturally split the images into deep blues (for her) and complex reds (for him), an aesthetic separation that mirrors both their physical distance and character differences. Having a conversation over radio provided some new flexibility in bubble placement and which lines could be positioned in which frames, something that’s not as easy to tweak with both characters in photo (or even in the same physical space). I hope that the crackly radio text bubbles read distinctly from the standard text bubbles, it’s an experimental approach that may or may not work for the standard reader.

Most importantly, I suppose, is the introduction of Valentin to the story. “Who?”, you ask. Yes, Valentin, the true power behind the New City, the inheritor of the empire, the dictator behind the committee. Portrayed impeccably by Andrew McMasters, this new face to the story is the real “big bad” behind the scenes, and he’ll be making things very, very interesting in the months to come.

The Nadia portion of the scene was shot on the roof of a mansion in northern Seattle, overlooking the sound. The mansion as a whole will be serving as the Nazarov family home for the comic series, its abundance of rooms and vistas providing a great selection of backdrops for what’s yet to come. At the same time as we shot this week’s scene, we went downstairs and shot a follow-up scene that will appear later this episode between the two Sisters.

The Valentin portion of the scene was shot in a bar called Chapel in the capitol hill area of Seattle. It’s a gorgeous location that we get to see just a hint of on these pages, but one that I’d like to return to in the future for more expansive photos and larger scenes. It’s a very trendy bar built in an old mortician’s  showroom, so the dark leather decor is complimented by a vaguely morbid yet highly ornate interior design. First time I went for a drink there, I knew we had to use it as a shoot location.

This episode is called “House Calls”, which is a title I really like because of how well it ties in to all the little parts. We get to see everybody at home at the end of the day, whatever that means to them, and shed some new light on who they are and what they want. Next week we’ll pop back over to the Skullhunters’ house and check in on Claire for a bit, then bounce around a little more and see what some other people are up to, ones we haven’t seen in a while.  Stay tuned.

And with page sixteen, things have come full circle and the stage is set for the next act of our drama. Now we watch and see who’s after what, and how far they’re willing to go to get it. There is one more character we get to meet, and that’s something to look forward to next week.

The skullhunters’ house was shot over a grueling weekend, fighting against the sweltering summer sun and the nigh-impossible schedules of actors at season’s end. For the weekend, the Night Zero team took over the house of some good theater friends, a location known as “the Octagon” and famous for its themed parties and unkempt state. The first day of the shoot was spent simultaneously cleaning and dirtying the house, clearing out room and optimizing the interior for our needs while fabricating boarded-up windows and a chain-link fence around the perimeter. The construction of the window boards was handled by Eli and myself, while the amazing Steve painted (freehand!) the looming skull for the facade.

For the neighbors’ piece of mind (and the Octagon’s security deposit), no permanent modifications were made. The window boards, purchased from our local recycled-materials store, were built into freestanding units that stood neatly in front of the house. The fencing came from our convention booth setup, and is a freestanding and easily-ported setup.

Sweating through the unyielding sun throughout the day, we put the set together in time for shooting to begin late Saturday evening, as our cast members were getting back from work and their various performances. The shoot schedule was something of a frankensteined mess, having gone through so many last-minute revisions as actors’ availabilities were tossed across time.  My design to break the schedule according to segments and shoot each segment fell through pretty quickly, and it was only by the grace of Kelly’s oversight that we managed to keep track of what we had shot and what we hadn’t.

This weekend was our last production before the advent of the shot card, and many of the difficulties we encountered on set were part of the impetus to improve our production workflow. The skullhunter’s house weekend was definitely one of our more challenging productions, if for no other reason than that in three days we shot nearly the same number of photos as were in the entirety of the first Night Zero episode. Naturally in the course of post-production some of these photos are cut or consolidated, but the fact remains that we were able to pull of a full weekend of hell to accomplish what we set out to do, learn volumes about what worked and didn’t work about our approach, and jump right on in to the next Night Zero project: the Sisters vignette.

Eli builds the framing for the window boards

Steve works his craft in the terrible heat

Creating a post-apocalyse

The magic behind the madness

Studying the framing for the next shot

Eli sets up for an overhead shot

Showing Ben and Christian the setup for the shot

Hot lights and sweltering sun mean constant applications of glycerine/water

Setting the frame and lighting out the door

Some of the cast and crew