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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