The pieces start to come together
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