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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