Journal Zero

Last weekend was a heavy-hitting event for the Night Zero team, my apologies for not updating the blog. We spent three days shooting a location from episode three that covers seven different sequences over the span of the episode, for a whopping total of 149 panels. To put that in perspective, the entire first episode of Night Zero is 185 panels.

We do all our shooting around the city of Seattle, in both public and private locations. Last week’s pages, with the messenger girls escaping the quarantine building, was our first chance to get down and dirty in the middle of the city. Our local readers will probably recognize the downtown alleyway, which runs parallel to 5th & 6th Avenues, between Pike & Pine Streets. To those who aren’t local, just know that we are in the heart of the Seattle shopping district.

A shoot like this always begins with a permit, provided by the wonderful Chris Swenson at the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Film + Music. Our assistant director Kelly Ota coordinates the actors schedules and puts together a shooting plot, which becomes the framework for the master film permit. A detailed description of the shoot, the cast/crew size, our props and activities, and our on/off schedule accompanies a detailed map of the area, and a check for $25. In about a week, we receive our master permit, which includes any special instructions from the Seattle Police Department, the Fire Department, or any other civil offices who might be impacted by our shoot.

Large-scale shoots, the kind that warrant closing down streets and pedestrian control, require a proportional amount of police presence to supervise such activity. Any shoots involving weapons, regardless of whether they are props or not, also require police supervision. That’s all stuff we’ll be doing later on this year, and are very excited for, but shoot in question we wanted to keep low-profile. The first way to minimize our impact was to shoot our three “doorway” frames, weapon included, in a separate, private location, and color-match the environment to blend with the downtown backdrop. With some sneaky framing and editing, the scene flows smoothly without ever having a gun prop in the alleyway.

The second way to minimize our impact is to shoot very early on a Sunday morning. Aside from the occasional hobo, the pedestrian and vehicle traffic was sparse enough to allow us full shooting freedom, and in the random situations where someone walked across our background, we’d just hold for a few seconds and take the shot again.

With a small cast, skeleton crew, and Kelly supervising our progress against the storyboards, what could have been an onerous shoot was over before we knew it. The rich textures and detailed backgrounds, exactly the reason I had chosen that alley, came out beautifully in HDR. The pacing of the scene is great, one of our first plays with using silence as tension (oh so briefly), and I’m really pleased with how well the actors brought it all together.

The final shot was done by the infamous Eli Black-Mizuta, who dropped by at the end of the shoot with his fisheye lens and penchant for raising his camera to dangerous heights. Photoshop includes some tools to compensate for the fisheye distortion, but these only can do so much, which leaves the image with a slight bow outwards. Not something that you would find in an illustrated comic, but it certainly adds to the feel of the frame.

Next week, all the dirty details on the montage going on now. Don’t forget to check us out at the Seattle Crypticon horror convention in two weeks, and keep that zombie survival gear handy. You never know…

Shoot location was half a block from Starbucks. Perfect planning for an early-morning endeavor.

Always have a copy of the film permit on set with you. And always have an assistant director as great as this one.

The girls were a little chilly, so they kept their jackets on while we framed shots

The shoot was bare-bones and the weather overcast, so there were no reflectors on-set. Kelly steps in with her notebook.

Even pressing the shutter button on the camera causes movement that upsets the HDR exposures. We use a little red button to activate the shutter instead.

The button also makes shots like this a little more comfortable

The directors at work

Eli with a big lens, plotting his next move

Visually, the boiler room sequence is one of my favorite scenes we’ve shot to date. The HDR tonemapping style tends to make our characters look somewhat gritty and dirty all the time, but getting on location with grime and dust and crawling on the floor with it… well, you can see what that turns into.

This sequence was shot in the basement of a local ministry house near the University of Washington. We cleared out the chairs, lawn equipment, and miscellaneous supplies they regularly store in there, but left the dust and dirt as it was. What you see in the scene is the authentic effect of the two girls being in the room, with no dirt makeup or forced application. Katrina and Tamara were troopers the whole way through, getting down and dirty and really playing the scene with the fabulous location they were in.

This came at the end of an already long shoot day last December, after we finished shooting the flashback and escape sequences in the quarantine room. It was also our last shoot with Alexandra as the production manager/safety supervisor, before she headed back to school for her medical degree. I was directing and Forest was on photography, with Eli doing photography support and Justin on production assistance.

Earlier script editions had this scene’s conversation take place while the two messengers were crawling inside the venting, done with side-shots as they moved through, but this look was scrapped because (1) air ducts are a terrible place to have a conversation in a building you’re trying to escape from unnoticed, and (2) the boiler room location was too much fun for us to waste on just a couple of exit shots. So we moved the dialogue to the room, filling in over Marion’s searching, and pieced together the scene as it looks today.

The greatest fun in this shoot was creating the illusion of the girls coming out of a ventilation system without actually having to get them in one. From a production standpoint, we are not a comic book, we are a film, so we turned to the techniques that films and television shows use to create such illusions, and did just the same thing. Thanks to the brain’s implicit desire to make sense of things, all we needed to do was create a sequence of images that naturally suggested the girls coming out of the vent, and the reader’s mind would fill in the rest.

The first shot is Marion’s hand coming into view, to establish her location in relation to the vents. It was important to have the vent and her hand in the shot, but we could crop the rest. This was achieved by placing Katrina sitting up by the vent, her head and shoulders inside, and positioning the camera to catch her arm coming out of it.

The second shot is Marion coming headfirst into view, to establish her orientation in the room and clarify who’s hand we saw in the previous frame. Marion is the important part, not the vent, so this shot was done with Katrina held upside-down in front of a blank wall (matching the wall under the vent). Not an easy feat, especially for three-exposure HDR, but nothing the Night Zero team would shirk away from.

The final shot glues the previous two together, by establishing Marion in relation to the room and the vent, at the same time. At this point the sequence of events becomes clear and the reader moves right along, while Katrina never has to be inverted and fully inside of an air duct. Follow up with a  shot of Tamara tumbling out, and the whole action moves along seamlessly. From then on, just revel in the beauty of the room and get the characters moving again.

Giving the rundown for the shoot

Me showing Katrina how to position inside the vent for the "hand reveal" shot

Forest frames the "hand reveal" shot

Alexandra gives some safety pointers before Katrina goes in headfirst

Katrina finds her way into the dusty old vent

Yup... that's how we did it.

Tamara in good spirits, even when on the floor and in a vent

Eli mixes it up with a shot from above

Directors and co-creators on the job

In other news, Night Zero will be holding a booth at this year’s Crypticon Horror Convention, June 5-7 at the Seattle Center, so get your tickets now and come see us. We’ll be doing free photos and makeup just like at the ComiCon, and would love to chat with you about involvement in the project. We will also be doing some substantial work in collaboration with the Fremont Outdoor Movies this year for some zombie-themed summer fun, and we’ll be keeping you posted as more information is available. And finally, this may be old news to some of you, but an independent zombie short was sent my way the other day and I just fell in love with it, so if you’ve got a few minutes, head over and check out the film “I Love Sarah Jane“.