Archive for the ‘Serial Episodes’ Category

the Potentials

Posted: 28th January 2011 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Concepts & Development, Episode 5 - "Reversals"
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On the development and design behind the messengers at home, and their parallels to the Potentials from BtVS.

Since the very first episode, we’ve talked about “messengers” as some collection of runners and soldiers and spies, but the only evidence thus far was Marion’s regular presence and Natalie’s appearance in the Special Delivery vignette. In my design, however, they’ve always been a sorority of survivors, a sisterhood of support and cooperation that makes them a powerful force in the post-apocalypse. And now, finally, we have the chance to enter their realm.

When you take a world with supernatural creatures, form a collective of young women to fight them, and put them all in a house together… it’s hard not to draw a parallel to the Potentials of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season seven. I was aware of this when designing the messengers’ scene, but rather than trying to find a way around it I opted to embrace it.
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Lawful Evil, Chaotic Evil

Posted: 21st January 2011 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Behind-the-Scenes Photos, Concepts & Development, Episode 5 - "Reversals", On Location
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On the exchange between Valentin and Jezebel, following the protest attack and Dariya’s death

The Valentin/Jezebel scene we recently came out of was not the first meeting of these two characters, as eagle-eyed readers know, but it is their first significant exchange even though it arrives so near the end of the serial. We always knew this scene was coming, but its tone changed significantly as we discovered more and more about the two.
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A Holiday Gift

Posted: 24th December 2010 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Behind-the-Scenes Photos, Episode 5 - "Reversals", On Location
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On the full day warehouse shoot between the Claire, Edge, and the Trio, plus a holiday gift

With the holiday breaks there will be no new pages on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, but here’s a special gift instead. In preparation for the publishing of our next book, Night Zero: Volume Three, I’ve been re-reading and proofing some of our vignettes and taking advantage of the comic reading apps on the iPad to do so. For anybody out there who uses a comic reader (on whatever platform), here’s a collection of some of our vignettes in CBZ format. And please let us know, is this something you’d be interested in more of?

The warehouse scene which just concluded last week was another of our all day affairs, taking the approach of knocking out a huge chunk of comic with a single marathon shoot. This meant we’d need a full crew on set, starting with Eli on camera and Jana on makeup/costumes. Eric returned to do his lighting magic, this time accompanied by long-time Night Zero fan/contributor Justin, who took up the ropes learning grip work. Eli was assisted by Kai on the camera side of things, and Phoebe coordinated the show as Assistant Director with Mike supporting her. The full call was eight cast members, just shy of the Dariya’s Death shoot but still much larger than our average shoot.
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Stories and Secrets

Posted: 17th December 2010 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Concepts & Development, Episode 5 - "Reversals"
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On the development of Claire and Edge’s encounter with the Trio, and the unexplained backstory elements of the Night Zero apocalypse

Once again, I have the pleasure of welcoming a favorite character back to the Night Zero website. It’s been just over a year since we last saw Marion on our pages, which isn’t the longest character hiatus we’ve ever done but it’s still a good while… especially considering she appeared on every single page of Episode One and nearly every page of Episode Two.

This scene between the Trio and Claire/Edge goes back a long ways, to the earliest drafts of episodes four (and then five). Its primary purpose is rather straightforward—it needs only to bring the Claire/Edge arc back in line with the Nadia/Valentin arc, by way of Marion. Pairing the duo against the Trio provides a more interesting dynamic than them just making their way back to Nadia on their own, and the action (although brief) is a chance to shift the power balance a bit and give Claire some new strength.

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the Death of Dariya

Posted: 3rd December 2010 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Behind-the-Scenes Photos, Episode 5 - "Reversals", On Location
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On location for shooting the Death of Dariya sequences

For the day of the Dariya shoot we had a 9:00am crew call: in addition to Eli on camera and myself as director, Eric was back to his lighting magic, supported by Jason and Justin; our post-production gal Jen had her first day on-set as a production assistant; Phoebe was assistant director as usual; Jana was costume and makeup supervisor but (due to her on-camera obligations) the makeup application itself was handled by Sara with the help of James. The bulk of the morning was spent hanging lights and redecorating the conference room to be a makeshift emergency room, while the cast entered at staggered times to meet their respective costume and makeup needs.

From a post-production standpoint, large-scale shoots like the Death of Dariya are more challenging to structure. The typical post-production workflow (handled in Adobe Bridge) separates the thousands of photos in our catalog by shoot date, for easy-to-find sorting chronologically. The downside is encountered when we do large, all day shoots, because shooting 20+ pages in a single day and trying to sort through 200 photos for the right 4-5 on each page is a tiresome process. Instead, for substantive shoots like this I break the scene down into smaller sequences, based on character entrances/exits and changes in action. In this way, a large segment like the Death of Dariya becomes the equivalent of six smaller shoots, each one spanning 2-4 pages and containing 20-30 photos.

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Pre-Production of the Post-Protest

Posted: 19th November 2010 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Behind-the-Scenes Photos, Episode 5 - "Reversals", On Location, Photography
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On the pre-production, location scouting, and new photography techniques in the “Death of Dariya” sequences

The shoot of Dariya’s death brings together some of our earliest cast members from the Night Zero project, while incorporating all the advances we’ve made over the last three years of production. Yevgeniy, Nadia, and Dariya date back to our first office shoot at the end of episode one in June of 2008—before dedicated costume design, before multi-point lighting, before shot cards and camera-optimized shoot schedules. That all three of these cast members have stuck around so long is something for which I am incredibly grateful; that in such time our production quality has grown exponentially is something of which I am incredibly proud.

Pre-production for the shoot was in some ways simple and in some ways challenging. For the simple side, we already had the full cast and costumes from previous episodes, so the only challenge was scheduling everybody at the same time. When dealing with some pretty prolific theater and film actors, that’s hardly an easy task, and must be done many months in advance. The downside to scheduling like this, though, is that once the cast is locked down for a date, whatever location we want to shoot at has to be available as well; if not, we are faced with having to either scout and secure a new location, or try and reschedule the entire cast and crew.
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