On the creation of the “Classics Gallery” for your enjoyment while we ready Night Zero: Origins to go to press, and prepare the great Episode Six to go online.
Every year, January and February is a busy busy time for the team as time and resources are devoted towards the publication of our annual volumes. Night Zero is a completely independent group, so every last detail is our responsibility: the layouts, the spell-checking, the color profiles, the type of paper… everything. It’s a fascinating experience to be a part of, but there’s a lot of self-pressure to make sure that not only are all mistakes caught and corrected, but that every detail is attended to and every page looks as clean and brilliant as it can. And of course, it all has to be completed in time for printing, pressing, and delivery from Chicago before the book’s unveiling at the annual Emerald City Comicon.
At the same time, every year we’re still on a schedule to maintain thrice-weekly website updates and continue production of photoshoots, so it can get a bit intense. Usually the pages going online from January to March are part of the book as well, which means that they are already completed and ready to be posted to the website. This year, however, the last of our book-ready content ended in early January and the only thing left is our grand finale, Episode Six.
Not willing to sacrifice time from the book to focus on Episode Six, but also not willing to give Episode Six any less attention than it deserves, I’ve decided to put the online comic on haitus (for the first time ever since the website went live in September 2008!) so that we can ensure the highest quality of both the new book and the new episode. To keep the site from ‘going dark’, and for your enjoyment, I’ve assembled a “Gallery of Classics” featuring curated images from our long production history, which will maintain the thrice-weekly update schedule our readers have come to count on.
As you can see from this week’s images, the Gallery will highlight photos from every comic, old and new. In part, this will help serve as a refresher of all the stories we’ve told, of how far our characters have come over the last few years. When Episode Six begins in a few weeks, everything it’s built upon will be fresh in our minds, and the conclusion of each character’s story arc will be that much more memorable.
When curating the images that would be featured in the Gallery, I went through every single photoshoot of the last four years (and two months), and selected renders based on a number of potential features. Was it a memorable moment in the Night Zero world, like the first meeting of two characters or an important discovery? Was it a notable moment in the Night Zero production, a milestone in our advancement of the photographic novel genre? Was it a new aspect to an old character, or a stunning location we visited? Or was it just a really amazing photograph that deserved a full-page feature?
Of course, there were a number of choices made of photos to not include. Most significantly, I opted not to include any photos from the Protest Shoot, the sheer size of which would unfairly eliminate other wonderful candidates… it will receive it’s own pseudo-gallery in a later blog post. And much of our early work, while interesting for the story, does not have much visual ‘punch’ as standalone photography, so many of those were rejected. Finally, a notable selection of some of our best images require a wide horizontal canvas and could not be framed properly in the available frame space, so these unfortunately could not be included either.
From the nearly-one-hundred photos that I found to be candidates for the Gallery, I narrowed down to my thirty favorites and ended up with a smorgasboard of images, each highlighting a unique aspect of Night Zero’s history. For perspective, I noted the date and location of the shoot, and you can see how rapidly and vastly our quality improves over a short time. At the same time, I tried to weigh my criteria more heavily towards our earlier works, to compensate for the overall lower quality of the photographs, so now the final selection is an even mix from all our eras.
It was a lot of fun going through all our old work, and I think I’ll take a few more blog posts over the next couple weeks to revisit some of our classic times with additional images, behind-the-scenes, and insights into Night Zero. I really hope you enjoy the Gallery as it comes, and look forward to your comments on the photos both here on the blog and on our Facebook page.