Journal Zero

Two quick announcements to start: first, we will be spending the weekend at the Emerald City Comicon here in lovely Seattle, so if you’re attending this year’s comic culture celebration, make sure to stop by #708 for some free gore makeup and an HDR photobooth; and second, I’m pleased to announce the launch of a Night Zero sister site that focuses on the production and behind-the-scenes of the project, check it out at http://www.thephotographicnovel.com.

Regular readers of the NZ blog know that one of my favorite topics of discourse is the “origin story” of a particular piece, and the Midnight vignette is no exception. Of all the vignettes to date, this one was the most difficult to get through conception, because it was not stemming from any particular need or opportunity. Jezebel started with “trapped on Night Zero”, Sisters started with “backstory of the Nazarov women”, and Special Delivery started with “shipping container yard”, but Midnight had no core inspiration. Lack of an anchor may seem freeing, but it’s hard to build up from nothing.

There were a lot of ideas playing around in my mind throughout the conception phase, some of which stuck through to the final story, some of which were discarded for being too complicated, too impractical, or too dark. Some early ideas floated around a story of skullhunters, or maybe a story of a young woman captured by skullhunters, or maybe a young woman skullhunter encountering a soldier. Locations often provide inspiration for stories, so I toyed around with military facilities, breweries, theaters, industrial crawlspaces, and medical labs. There were dozens of potential story fragments, a couple of which developed into potentially shootable stories, but nothing that quite hit the mood of what I wanted the next vignette to be. As I usually do when I’m in need of some clearer navigation, I turned to my mental back-burners to see what sorts of ideas I had previously set aside for later, which might be of use. It wasn’t an immediate cohesion of ideas, but over time, the various elements came together.

At the cover shoot for Volume One, we met a nice lot of eager zombies, many of whom expressed a willingness to return for a story role. Shortly thereafter, with the release of the book and a crescendo of events and shoots following it, I never followed up with any of them but knew they might be a future resource. A year later, at the cover shoot for Volume Two, most of the zombies were a new generation but two returned from before and reminded me about their potential. One of these second-rounders was Kristina Horner, whose forever charming and friendly smile masks a powerfully emotive acting & modeling skill. Working with her again on the second cover shoot, she was fresh in my mind as a candidate for a lead vignette role.

Another piece of inspiration for the piece was found during the preparations for that cover shoot, while I was sorting through the dozens and dozens of garments known as the “scratcher wardrobe”. Therein I found a white summer dress, a manifestation of calm and innocence, clean and pure. This dress would evoke the perfect contrast when stained with the blood of hell, and for that reason it was present in many of the vignette’s possible iterations. I kept it out of the cover shoot to keep it for a featured role, and after the shoot I mentally paired it with Kristina and they became the first half of the new foundation.

For more than a year, a talented improviser by the name of Shawn Franklin regularly expressed an interest in a Night Zero role, but I repeatedly resisted the urge to throw him in as a background character or generic zombie… his enthusiasm and range of expression deserved a leading character. I was pretty sure his would be a military-oriented character, but hadn’t yet had the opportunity to really put anything together for him. Perhaps, I thought, this new vignette could be that vehicle. I started to piece together his backstory, his Night Zero and his missions in the aftermath, at the same time as the Kristina/dress elements were falling into place. There was no definitive “eureka” moment, but rather a slow building of complementary ideas, and then these two characters, together for one night, and the affect they have on one another.

My overriding concern throughout the early design process, indeed something I was constantly cautious of through all the possible vignette ideas, was that any story premise of characters fleeing from infected and converging into a confined location, such a story was at high risk for being a re-hash of Jezebel. It was so easy to fall into that same arc, the same archetypes, the same drama and debate. A new set of characters wouldn’t be enough, I had to ensure that the premise itself was sufficiently different to avoid churning out the same tale. Which isn’t to say that I specifically focused on Jezebel and then tried to make the opposite, quite the contrary, but each considered story element was compared to what had been done prior to being accepted into the vignette.

In retrospect, Jezebel and Midnight are antithetical in both of the two main story elements: plot and relationship. Midnight is a story of strangers coming together in crisis, forming a bond in this most extreme situation and each having a powerful impact on the other. Quite contrary to Jezebel, the story of friends turning on each other and being driven apart by anger, fear, and selfishness. And while both vignettes are driven by the choice of fleeing or fighting the dangers of the infected, Jezebel’s story is one of danger from without while Midnight’s is one of dangers from within. So while these vignettes both had about the same production scale, run about the same length, and hold a very similar aesthetic, they stand on opposite sides of the spectrum of what happened to the world in the days following Night Zero.

Which leads to the fantasies of what would happen had it been Jezebel that Drew came across instead? What if Emily had ended up in the garage with Tracy and Clint? Those would be some stories…

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 12:11 am 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.