Archive for the ‘Digital Production’ Category

A Gallery Interlude

Posted: 20th January 2012 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Digital Production
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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.
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Lessons on Lighting for HDR Photography

Posted: 6th January 2012 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: "Sorority", Behind-the-Scenes Photos, Digital Production, Photography
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On the discoveries of how to light for HDR photography, and how the standard choices for film and theater create a lot of work for the post-production workflow.

As Syndicate moves towards its conclusion next week, I hope you’re enjoying not only the story but the soft beauty of the photography we present here. Photography is kind of our thing, our schtick if you will, but you’d be surprised how much we’re still discovering about how to do it well. Most of our team comes from theater and film backgrounds, where the rules and results of stage picture, presentation, and lighting are completely different. Theater light focuses on hitting the actors where they are and toning down everything else, counting on the audience’s eyes to adjust according to the changing overall light levels; film light focuses on contrast and multiple sources, each of varying brightness to make the actors “pop” on camera.

When lighting for HDR, the biggest factors are not how bright or dark the scene is overall (gamma), but how wide of a range there is between the brightest part (white point) and darkest part (black point), how many different measurements of brightness are between them (levels), how these levels are distributed (luminosity), and how smoothly or dramatically the levels transition between one another (contrast). Earlier I lamented shooting in and near direct sunlight for exactly this reason, but for shoots like Syndicate we’re in the opposite situation and it’s simply stunning.
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Adobe Workflow – 2011 Edition

Posted: 11th November 2011 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Digital Production
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On the workflow and post-production processes that turn a few hundred photos into a photographic novel page.

A lot of people ask me, especially after seeing a Night Zero shoot firsthand, about how I manage to keep all the work organized and turn it into pages. On our bigger days, we’ll have two or even three cameras running simultaneously and shoot out of order all day long. After an eight-hour workday, we’ll walk away with over 1,600 photographs that will need to become a dozen or so pages of graphic novel. I’m frequently asked, especially by people interested in photography and digital design, just how the workflow is handled. Today, I’ll explain.

Warning: this is a very technical post about photography and Adobe Photoshop. I do my best to keep my explanations accessible and my lingo neutral, but the content itself may not appeal to all readers.

Immediately after a photoshoot wraps, the memory cards are dumped to a portable hard drive with card slots: with the touch of a button, the entire card is backed up to the disk. Eli takes the hard drive with him to copy to his computer, while I take the memory cards and copy them to my computer. For every year of Night Zero I’ve set up a 1TB RAID-1 array: two identical hard drives always in sync, so that if one hard drive explodes, all the data is still intact. At the end of the day, the photos exist in five separate locations: the memory cards, the portable drive, Eli’s computer, and twice on my computer. Redundancy is key, and thankfully we’ve never lost photos to technical malfunction.

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Ally, On the Road to the Finale

Posted: 21st October 2011 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: "Ally", Concepts & Development, Digital Production, Episode 6, Photography
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On the continued production of Episode Six throughout the year, simultaneous to the production and online runs of the origin vignettes.

This week we begin a new vignette, ‘Ally’, which is our sixth vignette of the 2011 year and our twelfth vignette overall. Some of you may be asking why we’re spending so much time on vignettes this year, having already produced in nine months as many as we have in the previous three years combined… while the grand finale Episode Six remains nowhere to be seen. For today’s blog post, I’ll be talking about what our production is doing, why the vignettes are so important, and when you’ll be seeing the elusive final episode.

When the production of Episode Six concludes, when the final photo is taken and the last shoot wrapped, that will be the end of Night Zero as a photographic novel. There is no episode seven, and there will be no more vignettes. This has been our plan from the beginning, and one of the reasons we chose to do a six-episode-arc rather than only standalone stories. With that choice came an inevitable conclusion, which itself is directly responsible for the production schedule we’ve taken. Knowing that Episode Six would be our last, I laid down a production mantra for the year: “Go big and go outside”.
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Process Stories

Posted: 6th November 2009 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Digital Production, Photography
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On using Photoshop to create a photographic novel, the evolution of our post-production methods, and the power of non-destructive workflows

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.
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Night Zero version 2.0

Posted: 11th September 2009 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Behind-the-Scenes Photos, Digital Production
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On redesigning the website for better updates and archive navigation, plus a few remaining behind-the-scenes photos from the “Sisters” vignette

This week marks the one-year anniversary of nightzero.com, and to celebrate we’ve launched a brand-new website designed from the ground up for an improved user experience. I hope you’ve all had a chance to poke around and see what’s new. If you’ve got some feedback, send an email or post a comment below. If the page is all messed up and looks like somebody vomited HTML onto your screen… you’re probably using Internet Explorer 6.

Most immediately noticeable, of course, is the home page. While 75% of our regular visitors come for every update, the other 25% come only once a week, and we wanted a home page that was convenient for all of them. In the old model, missing an update meant a series of clicks to navigate to the episode archive or risking spoilers by back-clicking through the updates you skipped. In our new system, an entire week’s worth of pages are on the front page so you can jump right to where you left off. The previous images can remind you at a glance what the last page was, so you’re always on top of the story. Some favorite links have also been added to the home page, including some of our excellent photocomic brethren.
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