Posted: 11th November 2011 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Digital Production
On the workflow and post-production processes that turn a few hundred photos into a photographic novel page.
A lot of people ask me, especially after seeing a Night Zero shoot firsthand, about how I manage to keep all the work organized and turn it into pages. On our bigger days, we’ll have two or even three cameras running simultaneously and shoot out of order all day long. After an eight-hour workday, we’ll walk away with over 1,600 photographs that will need to become a dozen or so pages of graphic novel. I’m frequently asked, especially by people interested in photography and digital design, just how the workflow is handled. Today, I’ll explain.
Warning: this is a very technical post about photography and Adobe Photoshop. I do my best to keep my explanations accessible and my lingo neutral, but the content itself may not appeal to all readers.
Immediately after a photoshoot wraps, the memory cards are dumped to a portable hard drive with card slots: with the touch of a button, the entire card is backed up to the disk. Eli takes the hard drive with him to copy to his computer, while I take the memory cards and copy them to my computer. For every year of Night Zero I’ve set up a 1TB RAID-1 array: two identical hard drives always in sync, so that if one hard drive explodes, all the data is still intact. At the end of the day, the photos exist in five separate locations: the memory cards, the portable drive, Eli’s computer, and twice on my computer. Redundancy is key, and thankfully we’ve never lost photos to technical malfunction.
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Posted: 4th November 2011 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: "Ally", Concepts & Development
On the development ideas and iterations of the vignette “Ally”, and how it fits in (or doesn’t) with the “City Planning” serial story.
As I’ve discussed more than once over the course of this blog, Night Zero vignettes can originate for one of a couple different reasons, and ‘Ally’ falls right-square into the category of Actor Vehicle. For a very long time Night Zero and Kyle Kizzier have been exchanging flirtatious glances, waiting for the right time to get together… both in terms of scheduling and the perfect role. And while I haven’t known Sara as long, from the first time I saw her perform on stage I knew she’d be perfect in the Night Zero world. The serial episodes were well on their way to completion, with no major roles left to be cast, so I knew they would be vignette characters… but what vignettes would each of them get? Early this summer I first had the thought to pair them opposite each other, and spent a solid 4-5 months toying around with what type of scenario could take advantage of these two actors’ experience, talent, and great looks.
It was clear that they’d have to be strangers, because suspicion and conflict are great storytelling elements. Having characters meet each other makes exposition much easier, and story arcs happen more naturally when the characters have different objectives. Our heroes gallery is heavily favored on the female side, so for diversity I wanted to position Kyle’s character as the “main” character and introduce Sara’s character as the foil to him. The vignette would have to consist of an introduction, some character dialogue, and of course a fight with an infected or two… but who were these characters, and what would be their story?
** minor spoilers ahead **
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Posted: 28th October 2011 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: Events
On the 2011 all-zombie convention in Seattle, the one and only ZomBcon.
We’ve had a busy week this week, following up a weekend-long convention with the second annual ZomBcon show here in our hometown. Not only is this fledgling show part of Seattle’s phenomenal zombie culture, but a number of Night Zero family members were heavily involved with the planning and execution of the event itself. These types of big shows are always a lot of work and a lot of fun for the team, and ZomBcon 2011 was no exception.
Our biggest change this year was the decision to simplify the booth, where we would be offering our popular free HDR photobooth and our exceptional zombie makeup. Having spent three years conventioning with Night Zero, I finally decided that transporting and assembling our chain-link fence backdrop was just too much work to do at every show, so for ZomBcon we stuck with a simple decorative backdrop and the famous Seattle “population zero” sign. Although the fence backdrop is definitively “Night Zero” in style, my experience traveling to the C2E2 convention in Chicago taught me that sometimes it’s okay to stay simple.
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Posted: 21st October 2011 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: "Ally", Concepts & Development, Digital Production, Episode 6, Photography
On the continued production of Episode Six throughout the year, simultaneous to the production and online runs of the origin vignettes.
This week we begin a new vignette, ‘Ally’, which is our sixth vignette of the 2011 year and our twelfth vignette overall. Some of you may be asking why we’re spending so much time on vignettes this year, having already produced in nine months as many as we have in the previous three years combined… while the grand finale Episode Six remains nowhere to be seen. For today’s blog post, I’ll be talking about what our production is doing, why the vignettes are so important, and when you’ll be seeing the elusive final episode.
When the production of Episode Six concludes, when the final photo is taken and the last shoot wrapped, that will be the end of Night Zero as a photographic novel. There is no episode seven, and there will be no more vignettes. This has been our plan from the beginning, and one of the reasons we chose to do a six-episode-arc rather than only standalone stories. With that choice came an inevitable conclusion, which itself is directly responsible for the production schedule we’ve taken. Knowing that Episode Six would be our last, I laid down a production mantra for the year: “Go big and go outside”.
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Posted: 14th October 2011 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: "Sorority", Behind-the-Scenes Photos
On choosing the name “Sorority” for Lucy’s vignette, by way of discovering the message of her story and its place in the Night Zero universe
For a long time, this vignette had no name because we weren’t really sure what it was going to be. We knew the story, we knew the characters, but didn’t know what the message was, what it was teaching us about the world of Night Zero. In the beginning it was just called the Lucy vignette, and when we named Lucy’s sister it became the Lucy/Dee vignette. Based on their relationship, the only other name that really seemed to fit was “Sisters”, but we already had a great vignette by that name.
Another thing that was undecided about the vignette was the ending. We knew where act two began (with Lucy and Jill meeting) and we knew where they ended up (a pair of messengers), but when and how their first meeting would end was unknown. It seemed fitting to have a scratcher encounter with the two of them, so at least that much was assumed in every version. The number of scratchers would be more of a practical matter, depending on what our location was, how well-armed the two would be to fight them, and how many extras we’d be able to cast on whatever day we shot.
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Posted: 7th October 2011 by Anthony van Winkle
Categories: "Sorority", Behind-the-Scenes Photos, On Location
On the production of Sorority’s second act, and the challenges faced in the peculiar location where it was shot.
The day of shooting for part two of ‘Sorority’ came three weeks after we shot part one, and it was (in different ways) both easier and more complex. Like part one, we were shooting in a single contained location but still moving freely down hallways, although unlike part one, for part two we’d be shooting the contained portion first and the freehand portion second.
On the more favorable, simpler side, the action was more straight-forward and the lighting less dramatic, so the shots were more forgiving and easier to balance. It was also not the first full-day shoot for the principals, so they were more comfortable working with Night Zero’s unique production process. On the less favorable, more complex side, the location was more than willing to provide some troubles.
Our biggest concern going in, and one reason why we were hesitant to accept the location at first, was that the condominium basement storage area had no outlets. The nearest power source, aside from the moody incandescent lights, was a circuit powering some vending machines around the stairs and one floor up. More crucially, we would not have access to the breaker box, so if we accidentally overloaded the circuit and it tripped, we’d be stuck in the dark and have to cancel the rest of the shoot.
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