Hey Z-Troop

So HOAW is in a film festival called Halloween in July that exhibits both features and short films of the most deranged kind. Here are the details:

30th of July in Nashville, TN
5:00pm (short films at 7) 2102 Belcourt Avenue

www.halloweeninjuly.com

If you’re anywhere near Nashville, check it out!

George

Come one come all!

Local Vancouver short film production company Squelch Pictures presents…

The world premier of Hell of a Wedding! If you love zombie films and/or wedding films you want to be here for this. (OK lets face it, zombie films kick wedding films in the nads any day, but I know there’s a minority of you wedding film addicts out there. Father of the Bride 2 does make a great drinking game.)

So if you want to watch a quaint wedding get F’d up by Zs, you should watch this film.

When: Thursday, October 29th 2009

Where: 79 East Pender (at Columbia) It’s a warehouse.Vancouver BC

Time: Doors at 8pm First Screening at 9pm Second Screening at 10pm Into the streets by Midnight.

Price: Cast and Crew Free. Everyone else 5 bucks.

Will there be Alchohol?: Yes

For now, here’s a trailer for you.

George

Hello gentle film lovers,

Well the past month of post production went off without a hitch. The edit was done in a record one and a half weeks and is tighter than anything I’ve ever produced. I am very proud of my editors Adina Moore and Trent Payton! They convinced me to drop some shots that, as much as I loved them, were slowing the film down. It’s a little like dropping ones child into a dumpster, never to look back but oh well, thems the breaks.

The next week and a half was spent scrutinizing the films sound and creating sound effects for it. As tedious as it is, it is amazingly fun and satisfying when everything starts coming together. And the music just brings the production value of the film to an astounding level!

The Special FX went in lastly and this was a seamless operation because my fellow cohort Alex Taylor was working on all that for a few weeks before the deadline. They are subtle and work very well. Couldn’t be prouder!

On October 3rd I actually screened the film at my friends wedding, whom I made the film for as a wedding gift. An interesting number of people at this wedding happened to love zombie films. There were about 70 people jammed in a small room watching this minor epic. They laughed (I want to say they cried but they didn’t. Not quite Anthony Minghela yet.) But everyone had a great time watching it and left people wanting more so this is a good sign.

Keep checking back to see when this film will be screened in Vancouver. It will be within the next two weeks.

Take it easy!

George S.

The final day was a huge race but we managed to get something like 50 shots finished!

We filmed a big action sequence, the entire sequence featuring a zombie band, and finally the last shot of the film as the last shot of the shoot.

It was a marathon of a shoot and it would have been no problem had we money to pay people to work but we didn’t so we were under-crewed for the majority of the shoot.

But ultimately, this project goes toward finding grant money in the future and receiving money to pay people for their hard work!  Thank you all very much who donated your time for Hell of a Wedding.  It’s going to be a very fun film and we’ll keep you posted about post (editing, special effects, and sound). I don’t even want to begin to think about how stupid that sounded. Let’s just run with it and I’m going to sleep for a week!

George Somerwill

Day 3 of Four

Biggest day and biggest sh!t show ever! 80 plus people on set. Musicians showed up four hours late and they were required for most of our shots. Food ran out. Paramedics arrived because someone on set went into an epileptic seizure. Turns out it was due to fatigue and low blood sugar levels. She is fine and I just talked to her. I must tell you there were times today that I felt like throwing an epileptic fit myself because it seemed that we would not get our day due to our late start.

After everything was said and done we powered through the rest of the schedule and completed a bunch of gore shots and an elaborate action scene. We even finished our day with a few extra shots! We also had a specialist rig up a squib pack on one of the zombies and he was “shot” with a shot gun. It was my friends life long dream to assist with rigging something like that and he was in awe when it went down.

This is were the moral side of things come into play however. If someone is having a seizure and is in your shot, do you ask the paramedics to wheel them slightly out of the way to continue shooting? We didn’t, but the person in the seizure was joking about it when I talked to her.

Almost through! There is light at the end of the tunnel! It can only get better from here on right?

George Somerwill

Tons of zombie action today! First things to film of course were some vital “story” elements in which we get to know the characters a little.

The zombie extras started to roll in around noon. We had leisure suit zombie, booty short zombie, the trio of giggling girl zombies and of course, the all important jaws zombie!

It was lots of fun and we had a real hollywood stunt man John Sampson come out and assist us with our action scenes. He was by far the most gung ho person I’ve ever met. It was good to have people like him around set and the energy level was through the roof! Every one is into making this little film the best it can be and it gives me bonafied tingles knowing that so many people out there support us! Great make up artists, actors, crew and technicians, and not to mention zombie and wedding guest extras!

George Somerwill

Hello,

Today was a solid start. Not too many crew members though, and some had to pull double duty such as grip/ boom op and the ever important 1st AD/ Caterer, but the scene set ups only focused on a few of the main characters standing still. This is not to say we didn’t get any exciting shots. There was one that I am particularly pleased about. It blows my mind, it was so graceful.

So far, it seems everything is coming together. We feel tired but confident about what we have so far. Tomorrow will be the next test as we have about thirty extras coming out to join us on the production!

All in all, we got our day and knocked off a few extra shots as well. Lets hope this immaculate weather holds up for the next four days of production.

George Somerwill

Hey!

It’s been a long journey, and I bartered my pants away for a few pesos to get back to Vancouver, but our location is officially locked. Remote enough to get good sound and stage a good zombie attack, and close enough to be accessible by transit. Bathrooms and running water help too.

Speaking of pants, I stopped in on my talented prop master Kathleen H, where I managed to sculpt some new ones out of paper mache with the leftovers she used to make fake instruments.

The police have been disturbingly (luckily) laid back about allowing us to run riot with a double barrel shotgun in a public park. They say as long as we phone in and let them know where we are and what we’re doing with the gun, it shouldn’t be a problem. This means any 911 calls they get regarding a priest with a shotgun killing zombies they’ll just shrug off and file under “crazy”. I foresee tons of fun.

We are officially one week away til day one of four! Still lots to do! Check back soon and sign up to be an extra.

George Somerwill

Hey!

It’s been fairly boring on the pre production front in terms of no huge leaps forward. This is why writing and production are the best parts of filmmaking! We are right now slowly chipping away at the beaurocracy behind making a no budget short film.

When I revealed my budget to the insurance guy hey said “you’re kidding me…you can’t possibly do a zombie film with stunts and effects”. I just quietly asked how painful the insurance was gonna hurt. Who needs insurance…

To use a public location there are a number of fees a production needs to pay. For example, its 80 bucks an hour to have a cop stand around and make sure nobody gets shot with a fake gun. There are other silly restrictions when filming on public property. No burning things. No killing living things. No Top Gun-esque shirtless volleyball scenes. We’re working on getting those fees waived.

Tomorrow we go about making a fake instrument for one of the sequences in the film. We’ll tape it and post it here soon. I’m warning you, it’ll be super budget! Laughable? We have yet to see.

Now, back to fighting The Man (i.e. the laws that keep us all safe at night but prevent obscure films from happening)!

George Somerwill

There is no tiptoeing around it. The zombie film genre has permeated popular culture since its inception. Unless you move up to zombie snuff or grave robbing to make your film, you are very much well within the mainstream realm of cinema.

You are thinking, but this guy just used the word “cinema”. He can’t be all about wearing Ed Hardy tattoo shirts, driving fast like Vin Diesel, and rejecting a foreign film outright because it has subtitles. This is true, I’m not. But what happens when purveyors of the finer arts in life wantonly place these labels on you simply because you love zombie films? One needs to defend one’s dignity of course!

You are at an art gallery gala enjoying the tremendously well-reviewed expo on Degas. Suddenly, out from behind a pedestal bust, you are accosted by a middle-aged bourgeois woman asking directions to the oils (note: pompous aggressors will come in all ages, the younger, the more vicious). She goes on about how it’s nice to see the youth of today enjoying traditional forms of expression blah blah. Figuring you have made a common connection, you reveal your current project, a zombie wedding film, to your newfound potential patron. This is when the wall goes up.

Madame makes the comment that she is not generally one to enjoy that sort of trashy material. Simply respond by stating that whether an art-form is “trashy” is completely subjective. After all, the Victorians found the groundbreaking nude works by artist Herbert Draper, indecent and heinous. Rather straightforward by todays standards, the works didn’t gain notoriety and respect in the art world for at least 60 years!

She then complains of the violent nature of zombie films. You may proudly counter her argument by speaking of the metaphor of violence. Depending on the film, violence should never at first be taken literally. In the case of the zombie-wedding project, the wedding represents the structured, traditional, and very much fragile train of civilized thought. The zombies and their subsequent destruction of the wedding, represents the tearing down of these stuffy modes of thinking. The violence needs to be exuberant to shock the brain out of its acceptance of the status quo. The mind is thus opened to a more radical (and fun) way of thinking.

It is nearing gallery closing time. The woman makes one last objection to the work you have labored over for the past six months. She states zombie films are too silly. This is where you remind her that pop art by the likes of Andy Warhol wasn’t exactly trying to depict the last days of Jesus.

If she objects any further, tell her to shove it.

So there you have it, some valid and well referenced arguments to further push the zombie film genre into the fine art world. I pray you never encounter a scenario like the one discussed above, but if you should, you now have defenses against the upper crust. Perhaps we will see the inclusion of best zombie film at Cannes next year. I await with bated breath.

George Somerwill