While the juggernaut rolls along for Whoops!, with planned casting sessions, storyboarding, script tweaks and production meetings, we’re also starting to rack up the To Do list for the Zomblog movie:
'I've got an idea for this zombie film, right...' (groan)
1) Re-cut the series trailer for investors
2) Craft the story, characters and all the gory set pieces
3) Assemble costumes and personnel for the photo shoot
4) Hire some interns to do lots of Internet-based Zombloggery
5) Some other stuff
We also just commissioned a fantastic artist, Robert Johnson (no relation to the Bluesman), to create the first ever production painting for Zomblogalypse: The Movie.
Artist Ralph McQuarrie at work on a Star Wars matte painting
I LOVE production paintings. One of my heroes is the late, great Ralph McQuarrie who conceptually visualised the original Star Wars trilogy. It was his breathtaking paintings that helped George Lucas present visually, for himself and his Producers, what his wild imagination could conjure.
We can mostly conjure a lot of decaying animated corpses and beautiful landmark buildings on fire and stuff.
We’ve also begun storyboarding on Whoops!; a very important step that turns words and thoughts into pictures and concepts of how the film will look and how we’ll shoot it. Just as finishing a script is an important step in a film’s evolution, so converting ideas into cinematic imagery is the next part of the journey.
Errr... not sure how you'd actually explain this with words
Also storyboards are cool and usually look better than the finished film. Maybe we’ll do a movie made entirely of storyboards and pictures one day, like La Jetée.
Close up profile, woman. Man in background. (works better visually)
Finally, we’re off to London this week to have a pre-Cannes meeting of Producery minds and map out the production plans for both upcoming films.
In the next few weeks there’ll be more Whoops! poster designs and a fully functional website, plus a new Zomblog site geared towards production on the film.
We’re excited and terrified in all the right ways.
(N.B. These are not our photos or storyboards. Ours are coming soon…)
This is the first production blog for the Zomblogalypse movie. Future blogs will appear soon on the new-format Zomblogalypse site.
The best moment of today’s Skype meeting (Hannah’s in Korea for another couple of weeks) was Tony’s comment:
‘THE QUESTION IS, ‘WHAT DO WE WANT OUR ACTION FIGURES TO LOOK LIKE?”
You see, we kicked things off by talking about what costumes our characters will wear in the movie; what our collective look will be. This is partly because in three weeks we’ll be posing outside York Minster for this photographic event when we’re snapping some photos for our Cannes press pack.
Our Producer, Mr. Steve Piper of Coffee Films, is heading Cannes-ward next month to gauge interest for the Zomblog movie and Whoops!, the feature we’re shooting this summer.
Silly-faced people
This is not just vanity; our costumes are partly dictated not just by colour schemes but also by character. What we wear in the film needs to stand out as colourful and true to the characters we play. And we think we’ve come up with some winning ensembles.
We bashed through the plot for the whole Zomblog movie, which all takes place in York and sticks close to the Zomblog ethos of ‘three lazy friends in a small British town, plus zombies.’ It hasn’t been hard to figure out what we want to go into the film; if it makes us laugh or sounds cool, it’s going in.
Would you trust these fools to guard your town?
What is clear is that Zomblogalypse: The Movie is the web series ethos writ large. Bigger, brighter, gorier and funnier.
And more importantly, with better clothes.
For those who didn’t see the announcement a few weeks ago, our fourth feature is now in pre-production.
It’s called Whoops! and is a black comedy about… well, we’ll announce that along the way. In the meantime, check out the fantastic poster by Jack Casling, and have a read of the One & Other article.
We start filming in August. More news soon…
Oh, this is all very exciting. So exciting I had to blog about it.
1. I think we can officially say that WORK HAS BEGUN ON THE ZOMBLOGALYPSE MOVIE!
Woohoobrains!
It’s early days (we’re at the emailing and chatting stage; we won’t be making the film for at least a year) but we’re going to start working on things like:
- A regular production blog
- Fun reports from our development sessions & general ‘look at us, we’re making a film’-ness
- Location scouts
- Make-up tests
- General giggling among Hannah, Tony and me as we wrestle our silly web series into a fully-fledged feature film
That’s a lot of fffffffffs.
Ah, Cannes...
Our Producer Steve (let’s call him ‘Producer Steve’) is off to Cannes next month to get things going for Zomblog and also whore & schmooze our black comedy Whoops! around a bit and see who bites.
It’s the next big step for us to have a passionate, dedicated Producer helping us to develop, fund and market our movies, and it’s a very exciting time where we hope we can expand on all the work we’ve put in to get this far. We’re keen to work with many of the talented, fun people we’ve worked with before and reward them as they’ve rewarded us with their skills and loyalty.
Skoyalty.
2. WE’RE WRITING ANOTHER HORROR FILM!
Not Whoops! and not Zomblog; another one. As soon as we can, we’ll say more about it, but as with Whoops!, it’s someone else’s baby, it sounds ace and it’s pretty high profile, so we’re very excited about it.
Ahhh, children...
So that’s a trilogy of dark and ghoulish films we’re making over the next year! Getting closer to our dream of making several films a year, the Roger Corman-esque way of working that we’ve been building up to for a while.
We’re lucky to have gained some momentum and picked up some brilliant colleagues over the past year to make this happen, and when things get going a bit, we’ll announce the rogues’ gallery of who’s working on what with whom and who’s sleeping with whom, although if you see me in the street, just ask and I’ll tell you.
And finally…
'We must remain calm...'
3. WE’RE WORKING ON SOME TV STUFF!
It’s a funny old world, television. It may take months and it may take years and it may never happen, but Tony and I are both working on several TV projects that, through various contacts and opportunities, may get off the ground. They may not, but we’re working on it, and in the meantime we’ve got plenty to be getting on with.
Thanks for reading this, for supporting us and wishing us well, and for continuing on this exciting journey with us. What’s past is prologue, and we can’t wait to see what’s to come…
This, probably.
…is now online, and we can’t believe it’s been 2 years since we filmed the bulk of it.
This was the first time Hannah came back to the UK since moving to South Korea in 2009, and we hadn’t seen her for a year/since we killed her character off.
But we made up for that by shoving a katana in her hand (ooo-err) and ordering her to get her ninja on as her own twin sister. She performed admirably, hacking her way through York’s zombie population with grumpy aplomb. And Charlotte was ace as the mental little sister with the possibly fatal wound that drove the story… and crashed the car.
Possibly the best day of the Z3 shoot.
Two years on, we’re proud of the Z3 feature as it represents an attempt to go a bit more ‘epic’ and ‘darker’ as sequels are wont to do, but we think it’s a fun extension of the Zomblog concept; an adventure rather than an episodic sitcom.
The horror.... the horror...
We were glad to bring things back to the original concept in Zomblog Zero last year though:
As for the future of Zomblog, we are making every effort to get the movie into production in 2013 and several providential things seem to be happening to pave the way.
In the meantime, enjoy what’s online, because it all serves as the prologue to what’s to come…
'We may see them again, Mister Frodo. We may...'
You can see more photos from the making of Z3 over at our Facebook page…
Stuck for something to watch? Well how about a couple of trailers…
…a short film…
…and to round it off, a feature!
ENJOY YOUR SCREENING.
The popcorn’s on us!*
*this is not legally binding
The film we chose to make between CrimeFighters and the next big one was this little number. It’s a kind of B-side to CFs: full colour, anarchic and scriptless.
You can read about the making of the film here. It was one of the best experiences I had making anything thanks to the brilliant cast and crew.
Next step is to send it to film festivals and other folk to see if anyone wants it. Rest assured that whatever happens, we shall pour it into your eyes this year.
After nearly 2 years, our second feature CrimeFighters is now online for the world to enjoy forever, for free.
It’s a film that we’re very proud of for carrying off a fun idea that we were passionate about, and breaking out of the cycle of screening films to our mates at the local cinema. CrimeFighters is the little film that did big things.
Yes, it’s hard for me to watch now without noticing all its shortcomings because that’s what every Director has to face, but I can’t really complain. CrimeFighters has led to friendships, fellowships, festivals, more films and funding, not to mention reviews from some great film and pop culture folk including Empire/Sight & Sound’s legendary Kim Newman, and something of a cult following.
We’ve learned a few things about making films since CrimeFighters but we feel it marked a significant step up from the work that preceded it, just as it made us sit up and realise how much work we needed to do in all areas to become better filmmakers.
So there it is for all to see. We hope you enjoy watching it in fullscreen HD, and if you like it, that you please tell people about it. Oh and buy the awesome soundtrack!
Viva the vigilantes.
Can you name your favourite ten short films? Or perhaps even five? I’d have to think quite hard about it.
As Sarah Morrison suggests in this Independent piece, Britain is in a ‘golden age’ of short films, with more films being made and ever more opportunities to screen them to audiences, online or in person.
‘The short film,’ she writes, ‘with its capacity to convey ideas concisely, is capturing the mood of an increasingly time-pressed, information-hungry generation.’
Maybe in this attention-deficit age, this is just what audiences want: short films. The shorter, the better. (aside: so why did everyone go and see Avatar? You don’t have to answer that.)
My own opinion of short films is pretty ‘love-meh’. I’ve seen some – what I thought were – memorable ones and then promptly forgotten about them. That could be my incredible ADHD or it could be that they were too short to remember. But that’s silly isn’t it, because you remember songs that are a few minutes long, so why not short films? Possibly because you only see them once, not time and time again?
In the Internet age, you can see shorts, web series and music videos all day, every day if you want. Has this resulted in oversaturation or too much choice? Everyone’s a filmmaker now, and they’re all vying for your attention.
But that also means a huge variety and diversity of new short films to choose from every year, whether online, in a cinema or at a festival.
The first short I made was a very silly one, but one that people remember if only for the amazingly nutty performances and the catchphrase, ‘EH?’.
The Planetarium by mileypiley
I attended a seminar on short films at the Leeds Film Festival a few years ago and met a few people whose job it was to watch dozens of short films a day. Their advice was to make sure the concept was strong and to include a terrific, eye-catching photo in the brochure to make the film stand out as something they wanted to watch.
They also said that after watching 400 short films, the two or three they remembered were all comedies: ‘Go for the laugh’ they advised. This is something that creators of ‘virals’ know all too well. The last few shorts we made were either cheaply made for the gags, or rather more stylish attempts to work in several genres, rather than an attempt to make ‘short versions of features’. Is that merely what short films are, or are they much more?
While the comedy approach makes a lot of sense – short drama films can either be literally too short to make an emotional impact, or they can take themselves too seriously – one of my favourite shorts is Hotel Chevalier, technically a part of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Express but in its own right a memorable account of painful, destructive love that most humans can relate to.
Its use of Peter Sarstedt’s Where Do You Go To My Lovely helped to nail that one to my bedroom wall, along with the fragile, bruised performance of Jason Schwartzman who tells Natalie Portman, ‘I promise I will never be your friend’. So much said, and not said, in so little time.
I’m also rather fond of this little masterpiece, directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt:
Yes, technically it’s a music video for Zooey Deschanel’s band She & Him, but a lovely short in its own right, brimming with character and leaving one with a certain sense of uplifted emotions.
The modern showcase for short films, other than short film festivals such as York’s recent Aesthetica Film Festival, is of course online or in such initiatives as Virgin Media Shorts, whereby filmmakers get the chance to submit their short films for possible screening before major films in the cinema. Some of these have been great and some have been akin to those annoying ‘Sponsoring Independent Cinema’ shorts which play over and over AND OVER, FOR YEARS.
So are we in a ‘new golden age’ of short films? Several filmmakers I know seem to veer between thinking short films are a waste of time and money, or a powerful and pure expression of cinema. Some think they’re pretentious or pointless.
As someone who has made a good 20 or so short films ranging from the decent to the craptastic, I wouldn’t now wish to spend several years trawling a short film round festivals, marketing the same few minutes over and over. Nor would I necessarily want to sit through dozens of shorts myself, though I am often surprised when I do watch a bunch of them by the range of skill and talent on show.
For me, mostly, it’s all about features, and I know many filmmakers who feel the same way, turning ideas for shorts into full-length features to make more impact or serving as a ‘tester’ for a proposed feature such as the film that eventually became District 9:
After all, if you’re going to spend a few thousand and a few years on a film, it might as well be a feature, right?
The flip side is that I also know some filmmakers who have trawled their short films round festivals, and in the process have gained something in the way of reputation and/or industry contacts so that they may make another film, perhaps a short or a feature, and advance their career. A great example of this was Oscar Plewes’ Gin & Dry, a beautifully made short I saw at a London screening in 2010.
Gin & Dry Trailer from CAPTURE on Vimeo.
Then there are some makers of short films who produce something memorable every time, like London-based Alasdair Beckett-King, whose latest short film The Library of Burned Books looks set to be a typically majestic, visually stunning affair to follow up his beautiful short film Netty Carlisle:
Netty Carlisle & Iron Hands from Alasdair Beckett-King on Vimeo.
So do you go for the heart, the belly laugh, or employ stunning pop culture geekery and fantastic effects like Patrick Boivin or Freddie Wong?
…or perhaps a stunning graphics demo that’ll get you noticed by Mr. Steven Spielberg, as with this excellent Tintin sequence:
The Adventures of Tintin from James Curran on Vimeo.
Maybe the answer is all of the above, depending on your own personal taste and ambition.
And if you’re a filmmaker, how do you make that transition from shorts to features? Maybe something like this:
If you’d like to share your own or your favourite short films with us, please feel free.
What can we say, we just love doing stuff like this, and Zomblogalypse is very much in the Grindhouse/Evil Dead vein anyway, so this was inevitable:
