Journal Zero

Last month the Night Zero team took some time away from the zombie photographic comic book (check it out if you haven’t yet, here’s the first page!)–and produced a special homage to a new zombie video game, “Left 4 Dead“. Produced by the incredible team at Valve, the folks responsible for Half-Life, Counterstrike, Team Fortress, and Portal, this newest team-based shooter pits four survivors against hordes of the undead, in what is possibly the most brilliant execution of a zombie apocalypse game to date.

Unlike most modern games, where players can create their characters from a wide range of bodies, clothings, faces, and personalities, in Left 4 Dead there are only (and always the same) four survivors. This unusual design choice creates a unique play experience, as all players around the world become intimately familiar with these four characters—their voices, their mannerisms, they way they laugh and they way they panic. By forcing the millions of gamers to live as these four survivors, Valve has created a set of universal heroes, instantly recognizable to anyone who’s sat down with Left 4 Dead. Heroes that the team of Night Zero would sit down with as well, in our own special way.

Thanks to the wide networks of the Night Zero production team, getting a cast together that resembled the four characters was challenging but successful. Each of the survivors is very idiosyncratic and different, but none is beyond the everyday person, so pulling together costumes and props was no more difficult than any other Night Zero shoot. For a location with a range of backdrops and settings, we returned to the warehouse where the middle of Episode One was shot, and to match the game’s selection, we pulled together all the weaponry we could get our hands on.

If you’re not familiar with Left 4 Dead, I encourage you to first watch the opening cinematic, a delightful zombie flick in its own right, and a flawless introduction to every character and game element that makes Left 4 Dead so wonderful. Then, click on the image below to visit the Flickr gallery with our first batch of “fan art” photos.

These ten photos are just the first round, so keep your eyes out for another set in the next few weeks. Of course, this wouldn’t be a proper blog post without some behind the scenes photos, and boy have we got some great ones. Enjoy!

The greenroom, where guns and zombies and snacks collide

Francis getting psyched up

The witch getting her nails done

Zoey and Bill meet the witch

See how the hunter flies through the air...

...with a little help from the crew.

Even zombies need to a shoulder to lean on.

Startling the witch

Heading to the roof, where a safe room is being setup

Forest and Eli frame the shot

Like our stuff? Be sure to check out our post-apocalyptic zombie comic, done in the same style!

UPDATE: More behind-the-scenes info and photos are available on our second Left 5 Dead blog post.

As the publicist for Night Zero, I get the pleasure of introducing the book to many different people, and get to work with creators of podcasts, comic store owners, and editors and writers of various publications. It’s a blast to get to market a product that is so unique- not just a website, not just a comic book, not just photos, Night Zero: Volume One appeals to a wide range of people, and it’s been my job to find that audience and put the book in their hands.

Finding and advertising a product to an unknown audience is a difficult task, and I’ve gotten to be really creative with our marketing approaches, which has been a lot of fun. We’ve done various forms of online marketing, some guerilla and some more professional. I’ve also personally walked into all of the comic shops and bookstores that carry our book, Night Zero “Survivor Pack” slung over my shoulder.

We’ve received positive reviews in two different podcasts so far, and you can check out those episodes here:

The Webcomic Beacon

Seattle Geekly

We’ve also received positive feedback and support from a number of local comic and bookstores. If you would like to see Night Zero: Volume One in your favorite store, have the owner or manager email me (publicity at nightzero.com), and we’ll make sure we get some copies in there.

But one of my favorite marketing techniques is free stuff and branded merchandise. From the beginning, I knew I wanted us to get Night Zero shot glasses. The characters need alcohol to survive, so clearly it would be the perfect giveaway or trinket to sell! Thanks to my persistence, those of you who attended the launch party received a branded shotglass in the survivor pack. Those of you who missed out can purchase one at the Emerald City Comic-con. They’re big. And awesome. Another product I’ve been wanting to make for a while are Night Zero t-shirts. I specifically want one that says “Scratcher? I hardly know her!”, but I’m not sure how the rest of the production team feels about that design. If you’d be interested in a Night Zero t-shirt, send us an email, let us know. If you have an idea for a design for a Night Zero shirt- send it our way. If we use it, we’ll send you a couple of free shirts!

My focuses lately have been on two upcoming activities. The first is Emerald City Comic-con. Night Zero will be there both Saturday and Sunday, April 4 and 5. You can purchase your tickets at http://www.emeraldcitycomicon.com/tickets.php or at many of the comic shops that stock our book. We will have the coolest booth there, complete with free gore makeup and a chance to get your own HDR photo taken!

The second activity is a bit more on-going. Night Zero is currently looking to recruit a Marketing Intern. This intern will be in charge of a Night Zero street team, as well as other marketing projects that he/she and I see fit. If you are a college student who would be interested in earning some credits by working with the Night Zero team, send your resume to publicity at nightzero.com. We’ve already had some interested students apply, so get the resumes in quickly if you would like to be considered!

Overall, I’m excited to get to market a product that I enjoy so much, and hope that you enjoy it as well. Be on the lookout for some new marketing campaigns in the future- we’ve got some great stuff planned!

Episode Two is titled “Quarantine” for no subtle reason, and it was a blast producing this segment with everyone’s new favorite sleaze, Claude. He’s a fun character to work with, primarily because it’s our first chance to put Marion out of her element and change her stakes in the game. She can’t always be in control, although sometimes she still manages to get the upper hand…

The quarantine room is a rehearsal space in the Seattle Center run by the organization Theater Puget Sound, and it’s perfect for that gritty texture I wrote about last week. At casual glance it seems a fairly clean, though well-used facility, but throw it through tonemapping and every dirt stain appears, every crack deepens, and every scratch sharpens. Seeing the results of these photos led to more conscious selection of our future shoot locations: given a choice between similar options, we had new eyes to see how tonemapping could affect the atmosphere of the space.

This scene was the first shoot of Episode Two, and in addition to marking that obvious step forward, it also had two symbolic “firsts” for the Night Zero team. It was our first time using the three-point light kit, which gave us more control over our work, and it was our first shoot on a hired location, which was much easier to schedule and more efficient to shoot. Night Zero was moving up, past the hobby phase and now past the amateur endeavor into being a full-fledged production company. We even had fashionable “CREW” tees for the team to wear, earning the treasured title “redshirts.”

Shooting with a light kit requires a different approach to the shoot schedule, which complicates things for the talent as well as the production team. In practical lighting we would shoot sequentially, skipping forward when we had similar shots or as various cast members took breaks. But actors are easy to move and lights are hard, so a lit scene is shot based on lighting configurations. For the Claude sequence we were less prepared than we thought, and lost quite a bit of time with constant light changes, but it educated us on how to better work pre-production for our later shoots.

The updates were a little wonky this week due to international travel, but everything should be smooth sailing from now on. Don’t forget to grab your tickets to the Emerald City ComiCon that’s coming up, and if you haven’t yet picked up your copy of Night Zero: Volume One, now’s a great time. Stay safe from scratchers, and here are your photos.

Thus begins production of Episode Two

Bigger shoots require bigger guns

What a difference three lights make

Forest does a last check of his shots

Justin reviews his lines

Getting the talent into position

We're professionals. Don't try this at home.

No explanation needed

The office sequences that opened this episode were the last of what I refer to as “first phase” photography, back in the early stages of Night Zero production. When it was as much a learning experience and method experiment as it was an actual production, as we were slowly accumulating skills, knowledge, and equipment, we kept our flexibility high and our bulk low. With the exception of the warehouse fire sequence, the entirety of episode one was shot using natural (sun) and practical (what’s already present) lighting. The opening office scene, being a direct continuation of episode one, was the last to fall into this style, and while it was a learning experience, I’m happy that we have moved on to better things.

Since moving into episode two, we’ve done all our shoots with a three- or four-point light kit, which improves clarity as well as consistency. In episode one, 90% of the post-production work was tweaking and re-rendering the tonemapping to best match the surrounding frames. As the sun moved across the sky and clouds floated in and out, our light levels (and therefore exposure settings) were constantly shifting, yielding the optimum photos at each moment but a smorgasboard of levels to wade through.

With a larger production crew and photography assistants, we can control the the levels and balance of light on set. With controlled set lighting, we can shoot every photo at the same exposure settings, which astronomically improves the speed and consistency of our rendering.

Whenever we discuss lighting needs with photographers, they raise their eyebrows when we mention using a light-kit AND triple-exposure HDR photography. The implementation of HDR is most commonly used to balance lighting in unlightable environments, and the idea of shooting HDR on a fully lit set is perplexing. One of the biggest lessons we’ve discovered over the course of making Night Zero, though, pushes us in exactly the opposite direction: that only with both set lighting and triple exposures can we fully capture the look we love so much.

In the first six months of producing Night Zero, during the pilot and episode one, we were confused as to why some of our tonemapped photos came out with the vibrance and texture that is unique to our visual style, while others came out looking like “regular” photos. The same shoots, the same tonemap settings, completely different results. There is no How-To guide for HDR and tonemapping, and little to be found of others in the field attempting what we were, so it was only through much trial and experimentation that we discovered the trick to control the look we want.

When you shoot with a full light kit, a single exposure contains the right balance of information to properly render the photograph in a clean and sharp finish, much like anyone would expect to see from a professional shoot. When you shoot without a light kit but with triple-exposure HDR, tonemapping can use the information from the other exposures to compensate for the missing light information, and render a photograph of the same quality as the fully lit one.

Only when you shoot with both a full light kit and triple-exposure HDR can you render the tonemapped style that has come to define Night Zero. In this sense, the tonemapping can be viewed as a finite resource, and the lighting on the photo a scale. If the set is fully lit and properly exposed, the entire power of the tonemapping can be applied to enhancing the detail and vibrance. If the set is poorly lit and underexposed, the power of the tonemapping has to be spent bringing the photo up to par, and only what’s left over from that can be used to enhance. (Please note that this analogy does not work for the technology behind the HDR tonemapping, but sufficiently explains the results)

When we discovered this, we increased our focus on stronger lighting and consistency. Immediately our photos became sharper and more well defined. Our gritty, dirty environments popped with detail and precision. We locked down what we wanted, and now are able to focus our attention on environment detail, character development, and writing.

If you live in the Seattle area, you can now pick up a copy of Night Zero: Volume One at any of these fine comic stores. Worldwide fans can purchase directly from us, or on Amazon.com.

This hallway sequence is visually one of my favorites from this episode, because of the great textures and details of the location. From the gritty brick wall to the Windows-screensaver-esque pipes on the ceiling, this is the kind of complex background that HDR really takes well to. The shooting space itself was not ideal, constrictive not just in being terribly narrow, but also in only having two electrical outlets in the span of the entire hallway. Rigging the lights and framing the shots wasn’t easy, but the sense of confinement clearly comes through, and I’m pleased with how the tone changes from the conference room to the basement.

The challenge of not using any green-screen or digital backgrounding is the need for us to find shootable locations for every sequence in the story. While illustrated comic artists have no restrictions on where their characters can go, we have to produce Night Zero from the mindset of a film crew, making adjustments to the action and dialogue to balance out what the writer first drafted and what the location scouts deem feasible. On the other hand, using still photography instead of motion film gives us the advantage of jumping from set to set and blending the locations together without having to actually show them connecting.

I’m reminded of the television show The West Wing, where the White House set was initially split between two locations with an identical hallway in each one. The camera could never show the characters walking from one half of the set to the other—they always had to cut in that hallway. Night Zero can have sets on opposite sides of town that act as adjacent rooms, blended seamlessly together with intuitive framing. While this is something we regularly plan for, it happens that this hallway and quarantine room are both in the same location—a theater rental space in the Seattle Center. The rooms are regularly used by local theater and improv groups as rehearsal spaces, and through special permission we were able to shoot this brief sequence in the hallway as well.

We’ve now got our first introduction to the peacekeepers, the closest thing to a military and police presence in the new world. They’re the second of the three major factions in this story (the messengers being the first), and are definitely the most expensive to suit up. In episode three we’ll meet the leaders of the squad, called the 151st, as well as their adversaries from the third faction.

In other news, the “characters” and “gallery” pages on nightzero.com have been merged and updated into a new “world” page, which will continue to grow with background information and supplemental materials about the world of Night Zero. New characters will be added to the page as they appear in the comic, two or three more this episode and a whole bunch in the next. The new gallery photos include art from episodes one, two, and three, so if you’re sensitive about possible spoilers, consider yourself warned.

On Monday I’ll be heading to Germany for a couple of weeks, but if all goes to plan the comic and blog updates will continue as scheduled. When I return we’ll be going right into our booth at the Emerald City ComiCon, and we hope to see many of you there.

Eli photographs himself photographing himself during setup.

Forest is happy to be on set

Katrina adjusts her costume before the shot

Alexandra keeps the cast updated on the shoot progress

Alex and I wait around the corner for the shot to be cleared

Justin watches while Eli plays with lens flares

Forest and I review the framing before Katrina's shot

Alex stands his ground

The Volume One books have arrived, and are simply gorgeous. We’ve already started shipping out some preorders, and will have them all en route by next week. If you haven’t yet ordered your copy, it’s easy to do so now.

At long last we’ve returned to Marion, Claire, and all our friends in the New City. While “Jezebel” was a fun and interesting diversion, it feels good to be back on track and moving forward with our serial story “City Planning.” This second episode, “Quarantine,” will run until mid-Summer, and has got plenty of fun within it.

This opening office scene, continuing where we left off, also sets a new record for time-to-release on Night Zero. Half the scene was shot on September 28th of last year, which is consistent with our usual 4-5 month leadtime, and half of the scene was shot on July 6th, more than seven months ago. The second-place prize for lag goes to episode three and a scene which was shot two weeks ago, but won’t be online until August (six months from now).

These office shoots were the first time the full cast met each other, and the last time they’ll all be together for quite a while. It was a lot of fun working with such a diverse crew—Alix, an acquaintance of ours, Alexandra, an improvisor at UW, Ben, a local actor who attended a casting call, Jana, a local improviser who I’d worked with, Katrina, a UW actor and improviser, and Tamara, a UW student who also attended a casting call. Of this team, only Alix, Alexandra, and Katrina had met each other prior to Night Zero, although by this point Katrina and Tamara had shot a number of sequences together.

The downside to having all the principles at the same time, though, is the challenge of getting all their characters out there with minimal screen time. It’s not until episode three, when we have a variety of one-on-one scenes between different combinations of characters, that we can really explore each one individually. Marion and Claire being the exception, of course… we’ll be exploring their relationships and histories in great detail these coming weeks. But at the cost of individual face time, we gain this great group dynamic and can play with the different approaches each character has towards the others.

This scene also ends our small cast list, which was a simple way to keep the production under control but limiting in what we could do. These five that we know and love will be joined by a wide assortment of supporting characters, from suave to creepy, saviors to killers. Night Zero has grown enough this past year that casting has become quite a bit easier—as our circles expand and our reputation spreads, dozens more people join our network every month to help us fill the cast and crew registers. That means more stories to tell, more relationships to reveal, and of course, more potential victims of infection, conspiracy, and malice. I can’t wait.

Forest sets up for the establishing shot while I survey the set decorations.

Eli brought his fisheye lens to the shoot this day.

Forest Gibson in charge.

Setting the establishing shots.

Director adding some direction.

You'd be surprised at how much a table-sized map can cost.

Flynn balances our light sources.

When in a room windowed on both sides, reflections must be taken into account.

Framing, lighting, directing, and acting, all at the same time.

The DP at work.

The messengers await their cue.