Journal Zero

It is with great pleasure and a greater smile that I welcome Jezebel back to Night Zero. She’s one of my favorites in our post-apocalyptic world, both on and off the camera. Her origin story you already know, at least to some extent, but her origins as a character are just as engrossing.

It amuses me that, even though it was produced and aired nearly a year before this scene and takes place as a prequel to the serial story, the Jezebel vignette is actually a spinoff of from this very scene. What you’re seeing now, here with the truck at the docks, was the first (and at the time, only) scene written with her character. After floating around in Alexander’s brain for who-knows-how-long she arrived in the first released draft of Episode Three, delivered to the production team in early November ‘08. She was immediately notable for her opening character description, which was a full paragraph instead of the usual line or two, and revealed a complex character as well as the basic aesthetic notes. Even though she wasn’t going to be seen for a year, her mannerisms, costumes, and motivations were already an engaging topic of conversation amongst the production team members.

A few weeks later, as November turned into December, the scheduled production of the untitled vignette faced repeated postponements due to a series of snowstorms, and as the remaining pages of Episode One made their way online, it became clear that there would be a vacancy between it and Episode Two. We were ahead of production on the second serial by the usual amount, and could have burned hard to follow immediately, but I wanted the precedent of breaking between episodes for one-offs and vignettes. I was challenged to conceive a story that could be fully produced in a matter of weeks, regardless of weather conditions. The seeds on inspiration grew, and from a dialogue-based story to a garage safehouse to a few friends being trapped on the night of the apocalypse, the concept started coming together. What it needed next was a set of characters.

When developing vignettes, one of the biggest questions is whether to use existing characters from the story (”Sisters”) or develop your own set of one-time characters (Untitled). My initial planning was in favor of a new set of characters, as much to bring some fresh blood to the production as to expand the fictional world a bit more. As I thought of how the vignette characters would interact and what they would show from the experience, a nugget came to mind: instead of taking an existing character from the story, I could develop a character from the future of the story as an independent character. Immediately I saw the advantages on both ends of the equation: from the vignette’s perspective, including a character from the story provides a backdrop to frame against, a set of known rules and characterisms that can help shape the action; and from the serial’s perspective, developing a vignette about a character that hasn’t appeared yet provides a head start to establish and inform the character, so that when they DO appear in the serial story, the reader already knows who and how they are. Despite the detailed script notes that described Jezebel as a character, the growth and exposition of her personality were only in small portions across multiple episodes. ‘If I can nail her personality in a vignette’, I thought, ‘then when Episode Three comes around she won’t NEED an explanation. The moment she shows her wicked smile, everyone will know her, hate her, and love her.’

My first step was to call Alexander and get his consent to transplant Jezebel from his story to mine. With him on board, I asked for anything he could tell me about her: any fragments of future scenes or blips of unwritten dialogue, anything that informed who she was that wasn’t already in the Episode Three script. I planned to invest some of my own development into her as well, but wanted to ensure that any designs of mine would not conflict with her creator’s intentions. After some positive discussion and a mutually approved gameplan, I set to work on a story with the underwriting purpose of establishing Jezebel unequivocally as the femme fatale you love to hate. As I anticipated the reader reaction to her appearance here in Episode Three, I made sure to give nothing away that we would see or hear of her again. The first draft of the script was completed on the 13th of December, unimaginatively dubbed the “untitled garage vignette”.

It was important for her character to be Jezebel through and through, even at this early stage of the Night Zero canon. In the serial episodes, on more than one occasion the skullhunters’ nicknames are dropped or forgotten (reminding us that this is a world in transition and that not everybody takes nicknames seriously), but it was important that Jezebel never be called anything but Jezebel. She could have nothing behind her to make her any less the evil that she is, so it came naturally that her name would simply be omitted from the dialogue. As this liberated the story from risking her mysterious nature, it also provided the perfect title for the vignette itself. She is never referred to by any name nor provides one on her own, but the reader is naturally compelled to name her, and whether the title of the vignette is seen as a proper noun, an adjective, or a literary allusion, it’s the perfect fit for her.

At the same time as this was all going on, I was building out a cast portfolio for the upcoming roles in vignettes, Episode Three, and beyond. It was in this cycle that many of our new faces were cast, including Christian (as Edge) and Fern (as West), and one actor that I was very keen on bringing to the project was Sidney. I first saw her in a play directed by Katrina (who had been playing Marion for a year already), and when I inquired, Katrina assured me that Sidney was “a lot of fun to work with” and “a joy to be around.” In the first week of December, Sidney was added to our talent file as a strong candidate for the role of Jezebel, and it would have been a record for us in terms of advance casting (filling a role a year ahead of need), except that the following week brought Jezebel to the forefront of the production schedule. As the vignette developed and her character grew more and more well defined, I became confident that Sidney was the perfect one for the task, and the combination has been flawless..

It’s also interesting to me that, while this scene is the first written appearance of Jezebel, this photo shoot was her fourth with Night Zero… not to mention the numerous conventions and special events at which she has made appearances. When people see her in person at our photo-booth, or talk about the vignette (some referring to her by name, others by wonderfully malicious adjectives), I see that Jezebel’s impression to fans is exactly what we were going for: they hate her, yet they love her, and they hate her even more because of it.

Me? I’m just happy to have her back.

By popular demand, I modestly present (the rough approximation of) the official Night Zero store! It seems that people can’t get enough of Night Zero, and for those that already own our completely awesome book, a little something is needed to tide them over until Volume Two comes off the press.

To be fair, members of the production team both current and former have long pressed for official merchandise, specifically a branded T-shirt beyond the coveted red CREW shirts made available to our team. I was the one who resisted these calls, thinking it proper to hold off printing a shirt until… I don’t know what. Until the perfect shirt design magically appeared on my lap, I suppose. Friends, team members, online visitors, all were requesting that T-shirts be made for Night Zero, and I realized that our shirt (and general swag production) would just have to follow the same path as the comic itself: just start somewhere, and keep making it better from there.

The design I wanted to keep simple, and the stylized logo for the comic has always been a good look on black. For the reverse, I went back to the very first synopsis I ever wrote for Night Zero, from November 2007 when I first tried to sell the idea to Forest and Katrina. The one-paragraph backstory for the Night Zero universe ended with a simple, haunting sentence, and now, so can you. Some readers have already suggested ideas for other runs of shirts, and if you’ve got some ideas or (better yet) some graphic design chops, don’t hesitate to send them our way.

The other new item in the store, just to make it seem like it’s worth having a store, are some very chic shot glasses with the Night Zero logo printed on the front. These were originally used in the (very awesome) “survivor packs” that were given to everybody who pre-ordered our book, and people started trying to buy them when they were on display at the Emerald City ComiCon. You can never have too many shot glasses, it seems, especially in case of the zombie apocalypse. I’ll be perfectly honest and say I really have no idea how many of these shot glasses are left, but it’s not a lot and when they’re gone they’re gone, so if you’d like one you should act fast. Don’t forget to pick up an extra copy of the book while you’re at it, for your friend/coworker/awkward-family-member.

An update for those who have inquired previously, work on Night Zero: Volume Two continues slowly but surely. Like Volume One, our sophomore release will include episodes from the serial, vignettes, behind-the-scenes goodies, and other insights and bonus features. Right now the partial lineup includes episodes two and three, Sisters, the untitled vignette, and some advance previews of some episode four action that you won’t want to miss. Unlike Volume One, which was self-published, we’re trying to track down a publisher who’s interested in taking on the (understandably stigmatized) genre of the photographic novel– partially to get ourselves to a wider distribution network, and partially because self-publishing an entire graphic novel is just a lot of work. Work that could be better spent, for example, producing more comics.

Whether we find salvation through a publishing house or go a second round alone, the calendar is still on track for printing the second volume early next year, for a release in late February or early March. Just like last year, when we’re within a month of release a preorder invitation will go up, and who knows what kind of awesome swag it’ll include this time around.

We’ve been back with Claire and Edge for a while now, so I’ll have plenty to discuss about them and these pages next week on the blog. I’d just like to quickly say that today’s page has got some great imagery and camera work, and segues into some framing and layout choices that I look forward to sharing with you. And of course, everybody’s favorite thing, behind-the-scenes photos. Stay tuned.

The two-year development that has created Night Zero was a process of experimentation, not only in the world of cameras and actors but equally so in the world of digital imagery and photo manipulation. The production side gets more credit all around, because its growth and refinement is more immediately recognizable– just compare the lighting, framing, or backgrounds of the pilot or episode one with what we’ve done in episode three or the Sisters vignette. Throughout the process, post-production has always pushed along in the background, diligently taking its work in and turning the graphic novel out without much fanfare.

In truth, post-production is the most variable part of the entire photocomic process, with a day’s work ranging from an hour or two of rendering and page layouts to a ten- or twelve-hour marathon session of layering, color adjustments, masking, and compositing, all to get the looks just right. Many of the advancements we’ve made in the on-set production over the last two years have been partially driven by what happens in post-production, as we learn what (seemingly) minor changes on-camera can make huge differences in the time required and quality returned in post.

Back in episode one, for our first shoot, we were outside with only a one-person diffuser disc to counter the sun’s unrelenting brightness. If a shot contained Marion on one side of the frame and Claire on the other, we would first shoot with Katrina under the diffuser, then with Tamara under the diffuser, then clear the set and shoot the background with an adjusted white-balance level. These three shots were then separately rendered in HDR and composited together, stitching the properly-lit parts of each into one final photo. I’m grateful to say that such is not how we operate anymore… because of the strain that put on post-production, we learned to take control of our lighting with a three-, four-, or even six-point light system, and diffusers enough to capture the entire scene in one take.

The tonemapping process we use to create the unique Night Zero look is a very immature technology, and has more than its share of quirks and weaknesses that we’ve learned during our time. When we setup shots for frame-area and crop-area, we know that having a reflection of a light source in the captured area will ruin the white-point settings of the HDR image, so we can plan for that and keep better consistency between our tonemapped images (which means less re-tweaking and filtering in post). When we deal with action shots or other hard-to-hold setups, we know that the highest of the three exposures is (under standard lighting conditions) the least significant, and should be the first one dropped if undesirable motion occurs between exposures.

No matter what we did, however, there was still an inevitable reality that post-production is time consuming. Merging exposures into an HDR image isn’t quick, and the mandatory Photoshop prompts ensure that somebody has to sit in front of the computer the entire time, clicking here and there throughout the process. To further aggravate matters, an undocumented feature difference between the “regular” Photoshop and the more expensive “Extended” edition is the (in)ability to convert layers to Smart Objects* when in a 32-bit environment, which means that Night Zero lost that time-saving ability when we upgraded to CS4 last year.

* The future of digital photography and photo manipulation is the advancement of so-called “non-destructive” photo editing, and with each new version of Photoshop comes a new set of tools that can be used in the classic (destructive) or newly non-destructive manner. For example, in both digital and physical photography, a classic method of coloring a photo would be to paint very lightly over the image with the color desired, while a non-destructive method would be to lay a colored gel overtop of the photo. Both methods yield the same result, but in one method the original photo is destroyed in the process and in the other method, the original photo remains untouched. In Photoshop these are called “Smart Objects”, and they are original images that can be scaled, colored, or even tonemapped over and over again without ever changing the source material.

This non-destructive ability is essential to the Night Zero workflow. Going from three source exposures to the comic-style image is a two-step process: first, the three exposures are combined into a 32-bit HDR image, and then the 32-bit image is tonemapped. Tonemapping is an effect with dozens of variables, all manner of adjustments and settings that affect the final look of the image. As mentioned above, even little changes in how a photo is shot or where the light hits the frame can make two nearly-identical HDR images with identical tonemap settings look drastically different. By using Smart Objects while we tonemap, when a rendered image looks different from its neighbors we have the ability to go back to the tonemap settings and tweak them to our heart’s content. Every time the settings are changed, it’s a wait while the computationally-intensive effect is applied, but without Smart Objects we would have to go back to the source images and re-render the HDR images every time as well… an additional three minutes every time we wanted to change tonemap settings (typically done 10-15 times per image).

Photoshop comes with a feature called Batch processing, where one can  ”record” a series of actions and then automate a workflow that duplicates this series of actions on any number of files. Unfortunately this is a very limited feature for both of Night Zero’s most time-consuming tasks: rendering three photos to HDR cannot be batched because batch only handles one source file at a time, and tonemapping cannot be batched (in standard Photoshop) because 32-bit files (HDR images) cannot be made into Smart Objects. So for the last year, we’ve been manually rendering every single HDR image we’ve taken, and using an obtuse workaround to trick Photoshop into saving them as Smart Objects. The end result was exactly what we needed, but the process was time consuming and mentally draining.

I’ve recently started getting back into programming, and some minor adventures back to javascript brought to my attention the powerful big-brother of the Batch function: Scripts. By utilizing advanced scripting and unlimited functions, programs can be written to control Photoshop way beyond what can be “recorded” into a Batch job. I was very rusty and had never written for Adobe software before, so it was slow going at first, but sure and steady I began to mold Photoshop to my will. It started with a very simple concept… Photoshop knows the names of the files that are used to make the HDR image, so I wanted to get the program to tell me the first file it used. Once it could do that, I got it to use a part of that filename and automatically save the rendered HDR image in the Night Zero naming convention. When that was up and running, I knew I was in for the long haul.

The Photoshop feature that merges photos into an HDR image is itself just a script, from which code can be copied or which can be directly edited. In due time I had different spawns of that script, each customized for different Night Zero uses. My ultimate goal had been accomplished with the master script: submit one file to the script, and it would take that file and the two following it (which, in Night Zero terms, would always comprise the three exposures) and merge them into an HDR file without any questions or prompts. Once rendered, the file was saved with i’s Night Zero name (taken from the first file of the group), and then the 32-bit file was re-opened and saved as a Smart Object using the workaround I’d discovered back when we first upgraded to CS4. That done, the file was to be closed out and the next one opened, the process repeating as much as necessary.

With that one script, the post-production landscape was turned upside-down. Preparing an entire shoot’s worth of photos for tonemapping and layout, a task which previously took 10-15 minutes per photo, could now be initialized in less than five minutes and left to run on its own. True, in an automated environment the time per photo dropped to closer to five minutes than ten, but that’s irrelevant when nobody has to sit and babysit the machine. Mental energies can be spared that labor, and focus on the real challenge of color-matching the different shots and working for a consistent, attractive look across the entire shoot.

Had I developed these scripts when Night Zero first started two years ago, I don’t know how many weeks of my life would have been spared the grueling task of manually rendering photos into HDR, but if you figure 12 minutes per photo, six photos per page, three pages per week…

Most of all, I’m happy that post-production finally received a powerful boost to productivity and an increased capacity for growth it so desperately needed. So many energies had been focused on pre-production and live production that the work of post had been largely taken for granted, despite the draining and tedious work it required. There is new life in post-production, and much more free time to explore it.  I see only good things yet to come.