Archive for the ‘Episode 1 – “Ashes”’ Category

To Be Continued

Posted: 12th December 2008 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Behind-the-Scenes Photos, Episode 1 - "Ashes", On Location
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On the challenges of shooting on-location with variable lighting and large casts

And that’s a wrap! Thus concludes the first episode of the Night Zero serial comic series, “Ashes”, and soon will begin the second episode, “Quarantine”. Although part two won’t begin until January 19th, stick around because nightzero.com will still be getting it’s thrice-weekly updates.

The serial comic is just a scratch on the surface of the post-apocalyptic world, and this gap between episodes is the perfect opportunity to present some other perspectives of life after infection. Coming up next week is a piece of short fiction about a one-man “search-and-rescue” business, and then a stand-alone comic story of love and loss. Add in a few one-shot photographs, and we’ll be back to Marion and Claire before you know it.
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The Faces of Night Zero

Posted: 5th December 2008 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Episode 1 - "Ashes"
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On casting the first two episodes of Night Zero

It was one year ago this Monday that Katrina joined the Night Zero family, becoming the first actor in our ranks, and we couldn’t be more blessed. She gave her all when Night Zero was still just a concept, help nurture the idea and develop not only her character, but the world as a whole. She stuck through the learning adventure of creating the pilot episode, with long cold nights and early freezing mornings, trials and reshoots, blood and guts. Without her committment and enthusiasm, we’d never have made it to where we are.

Katrina is one of the many people in the production family that we recruited directly.  Forest and I both knew her from the improv troupe at the University of Washington, for which I was Technical Director and they both in the ensemble. She was also in the cast of a show I directed for the Undergraduate Theater Society at UW (in which Tara Miller also starred, and Forest stage managed). Having worked with her for years, having seen many sides of what she can do, and knowing that she meshed well with the other members of the team, she was a natural first choice for the lead.
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Keeping it real in photography

Posted: 21st November 2008 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Behind-the-Scenes Photos, Episode 1 - "Ashes", On Location, Photography
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On shooting a post-apocalyptic photographic novel without greenscreens or CGI, entirely on location

I’ve never been a fan of the (now standard) practice of “phoning in” set locations, props, and visual elements. Most likely coming from my theater background, when everything has to be real, I cannot stand when films opt for the easy, cheap solution of standing actors in front of green screens and faking everything else. While a film like Jurassic Park or Lord of the Rings benefits tremendously from the investment of shooting on-location, films like (the new) Star Wars and 300 come off as cheap hacks. I give credit to the actors that can manage to act in a bright green void, but loathe the directors and producers who take that cop out.

With Night Zero, I insist that all of our shoots be on location, all of our costumes and props real, all of our actors in the moment. Nothing in Night Zero is on a green screen, and we rely on post-production only for things that are impossible to shoot in HDR– splattering blood, for example, which would not hold still for three exposures. Action sequences are staged stationary, and given blur and speed-line enhancements to indicate motion. And sometimes, shots are broken up into multiple elements, to split focus between multiple entities.
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Lights, Camera, ACTION

Posted: 14th November 2008 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Behind-the-Scenes Photos, Digital Production, Episode 1 - "Ashes"
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On the workflow for handling HDR images in Photoshop CS4

As promised, a little action and a little blood. These sorts of sequences are by far the hardest to coordinate and the hardest to produce, but they sure are a blast. Over the past year of creating Night Zero, we’ve shot four large-scale scratcher fight sequences, and those have been some of the most fun times we’ve had. From a freezing night in January to a scorching cloudless day in July, our scratchers have been real troopers, and I cannot emphasize enough how much they rock.

This week we upgraded to Photoshop CS4, primarily for its 64-bit compatibility. Previous versions of Photoshop (and most software) are only capable of understanding up to 4 gigs of memory, which is way more than most people would ever need, but is a difficult limitation for Night Zero. I’m a huge advocate of data redundancy and non-destructive editing, so every iteration of our photos is self-contained. The major advantage here is that nothing is permanent, and any change or alteration we make can be reversed at any time, without undoing everything that happened after the change. The disadvantage is that every progressive file contains all the data of all the previous files.
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Multi-tasking

Posted: 17th October 2008 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Behind-the-Scenes Photos, Digital Production, Episode 1 - "Ashes"
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On developing a workflow for a unique production project, with an understaffed all-volunteer team

The biggest disadvantage we face in the production of Night Zero is having a core crew of producers responsible for an army’s worth of tasks. At the moment, we are simultaneously finishing post-production on Episode One, in the middle of principal production of Episode Two, beginning pre-production of Episode Three, optimizing the Night Zero website, and of course, publishing Volume One.

The production process we’ve developed over the past eleven months is something of a blur between sketching a comic concept and storyboarding a film. We begin with the script, breaking it down into shot sequences that are tackled at a particular location or series. As director, I first block out all the actions and emotions I see in the sequence, and create a “Shot List” of each moment in time I want to capture. This rough sequence of events I then lay out into pages, approximating the size, shape, and location of each shot on the comic book pages.
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Printing the Apocalypse

Posted: 10th October 2008 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Behind-the-Scenes Photos, Episode 1 - "Ashes", Photography
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On shooting a cover for our self-published debut book

Things are picking up this week, both for the online serial (the stage is being set for the action yet to come) and the real-world production. Last weekend saw our final shoot for Volume One, being the cover shoot, and saw more scratchers and gore than we’ve tackled to date. It was a delightfully successful shoot, we met a nice group of new people who were very enthusiastic and fabulous as our zombies, and the cover for Volume One is definitely going to stand out when it hits bookstore shelves at the end of the year. I saw the first printed draft of the completed book this morning, and it is stunningly gorgeous (and heavy). I cannot emphasize enough how much stronger the HDR photography shows up on paper than on the computer screen.
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