Mea gran culpa for the longish hiatus since the last installment of “Lights! Camera! Zombies!”…but in our defense we’ve been busy shooting the shit out of Z: A ZOMBIE MUSICAL. In recent weeks we’ve amassed so much footage that we finally passed the Fail Safe point, and there’s no way now that we’ll return to base without delivering our explosive payload to the primary targets assigned to us with clear mind and conscience by our Group Commander, General Jack T. Ripper.
It’s a heady time on any movie project when you reach the point where you’re far closer to the end than the beginning. Yet it’s also a bit frightening. Many of your deepest fears and darkest imaginings emerge as you near the end of any major artistic effort. Because you can’t help reflecting on what you’ve done, how you’ve spent your time and creative energies for the last many months and what you might’ve done differently.
I mean, what if the Giants we’ve been battling day and night since this past summer really ARE just windmills, as saner minds would have us believe?!
Well, don’t believe it, baby! First, sane people have NO place in show business. Second, the great, swirling behemoths on the horizon actually ARE Giants, end of story. And we’ve been slaying them in ones and twos each and every shooting weekend, until now only a few remain standing before us, taunting us to vanquish them in turn.
The objective of this column since the beginning has been to describe some of the windmills--errr, Giants--we faced and how we slew them. Perhaps the most fearsome Giant of all, especially considering this is a musical, has been the songs in Z. I can now smugly report that all 12 of the original songs in the show are recorded and fully mixed together in suburb fashion by our audio engineer, Ben Blank. (This leaves only the “bonus” 13th Song, “A Zombie-Human Love”, remaining to work its way through the recording/mixing process.)
En fin, I’d like to start sharing some of our tunes. The set-up for this first installment is simple enough: early on our Heroines get turned into Zombies and stumble upon an organized community of Zombies living in an idyllic enclave called Zomburbia. Since our Heroines are new to the Zombie life, they’re coached through a few of the particulars…in this case, how to walk and (not) talk when around Humans.
Here’s the 6th Song in the picture: “Zombie Walk”…
Hey, thanks for listening!
Along the way, we also slew perhaps our most fearsome Giant, the one guarding the very start of the picture. A principal challenge in any filmed musical is how to negotiate the transition between “talking” and “singing”. In any musical, by definition, sooner or later your characters are gonna bust into song. And you either carry the audience with you through this transition, so the singing feels like an integral part of the entire experience…or you don’t. (And if you don’t, you end up with an unwatchable piece of crap like Disney’s NEWSIES.)
My solution to this all-important transition was to put it right up front, beginning with a song from Frame One so we hear our Heroines singing from the very start. Only later do we add talking into the mix. That way we’d establish the vocabulary of this picture--that people are gonna express themselves in part by singing and dancing--from the first moments of their story.
The opening number features our three female leads swimming in the ocean while singing a completely re-written version of the classic Gilbert & Sullivan ditty, “Three Little Maids”, from THE MIKADO. (This was another deliberate choice, to use a piece of music that a majority of the audience would find familiar, even if they don’t necessarily know the name of the piece or where they might’ve heard it before. FOOTNOTE: Long after this song was written and recorded for Z, I got hooked on Larry David’s hyper-brilliant CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM. To my delight, this very same tune from “Three Little Maids” is used in virtually every single episode of the show…increasing its potential familiarity to audiences.)
Finally, to make the music unique and integral to our own show, we eschewed the customary orchestral performance accorded Gilbert & Sullivan’s tunes. Instead, Dan Eggleston, our indefatigable Music Coordinator, recruited a group of musicians to play it on more home-grown instruments--including a fiddle, upright bass, mandolin and accordion.
Oh, what the hell, here’s a bonus 2nd Song for this column, “Three Little Nuns”…
With the completed song in hand, it was time to shoot the opening scene itself. It turns out there’s no ocean within hundreds of miles of Austin--believe me, we checked and double-checked all the maps!--but we do have the distinction of being surrounded on seemingly all sides by an enormous network of lakes. One of our Location Managers found us an isolated little section of public lakefront that he felt would fit the bill. Best of all, this secluded finger of the lake promised a gentle, grassy slope right to water’s edge, in stark contrast to the usually rock- and boulder-strewn terrain surrounding our watery playgrounds.
On the day, we loaded up cast, gear, two dogs and our “closed-set” crew--a select group culled from our already mostly female crew and who are invariably present on shoots involving small or large amounts of nudity, of which this was just such a day.
ZOMBIE BUS…
Chief among the vehicles headed out to the lake was the 1978 VW Bus our Heroines drive throughout the show. Not only is this antiquated VW Bus, with its original lime green paint job and hideously beautiful, ‘70s-era green-on-green interior the perfect Zombie Bus, but it also doesn’t have current registration or inspection stickers, nor insurance, nor even valid license plates--making it the ideal picture car for our scofflaw shooting philosophy. It also keeps the hapless crewmember selected to drive it out to the location on their toes, since they could be pulled over at any instant, ticketed multiple times, the day’s shoot lost and perhaps the Bus itself impounded.
With sugar-coated fantasies of motor-vehicle compliance dancing in our heads, we made the 30-something mile journey down scarcely marked country roads to what was advertised to us as an utterly deserted corner of the lake--perfect, we were told, for a shoot that would see all 3 lead actresses in a state of partial or complete undress throughout the day. Naturally, when we were arrived there were at least two dozen people present at the “isolated” location, clustered together in 5 or 6 groups, each with enough high-tech, motorized camping technology to launch the Space Shuttle…which is how people in this neck of the woods like to rough it. To our relief, by the time we found the farthest-removed corner of the campground and broke out our equipment, most of the putative campers had putatively decamped, leaving us to our own nefarious devices.
In two independent features and numerous shorts, this was my first time to shoot in water. Instinctively, I’d already guessed that the key to a successful water shoot is to NOT actually shoot in the water unless absolutely necessary. Keeping the equipment and the crew out of the water as much as possible seemed preferable on all counts. (This was later confirmed by reading interviews with key crewmembers on such watery productions as PERFECT STORM and the upcoming 2nd Re-Make of THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE.) Accordingly, we hauled our 15-foot dolly track and 9-foot Cobra Crane to the shoot, thinking we’d set up right at water’s edge and capture a good deal of the song/dance from the comfort of dry land.
But, rather to our horror, we discovered the “dry land” surrounding the lake in this area was neither dry nor land according to the customary usage of either word.
It had rained precious little all summer long--which was great for our primarily outdoor production, since to date we’d only lost a single shooting day due to rain--but most bad indeed for the local water levels. In the month or so since our Location Manager had scouted this place for us, the water had receded substantially, leaving a 30-foot stretch of foul-smelling, water-logged, shin-deep mud posing as a beachfront. Shooting on the bank was out of the question…hell, just standing on the mushy bank was barely possible, since if you simply stood still in the blackish gunk, you’d slowly sink deeper and deeper until dislodging yourself became a major effort.
METAMORPHOSIS…
This was a setback, no doubt, but we’d figure a way to deal with it. There’s far worse things than encountering an unforeseen obstacle at a remote location. (For example, any one of us could’ve endured the nightmarish prospect of waking up one morning from uneasy dreams and finding ourselves transformed into an Acting Teacher. E-fucking-gads! Any right-thinking person would much rather find themselves transformed into, say, a gigantic cockroach stuck to the roof of the bedroom than into that even more foul and pestilent creature, the Acting Teacher!)
Because of the thick, wet mud, we would have to shoot in the water itself. Fortunately, the crew all sported bathing suits for just such an occasion. The treacherous portage through the Mud Flats with just the bare-bones gear took upwards of 10 minutes a trip. Ironically, once we were out in the water, the footing was somewhat firmer. But we were still surrounded by water and constantly mindful of the fact that if anyone near the camera slipped and took it down with them the entire movie would be over…since none of us remotely had the bank to replace what would surely be a ruined Sony High-Def Camera.
We had tons of pages to cover and knew it’d be a long day, and thus Helios would be driving his chariot relentlessly across the sky, so we opted to shoot the entire opening sequence in chronological order. That way the sun would change consistently over time as the song advanced and would be less noticeable than if we picked up a shot here and a shot there, with the sunlight at all kinds of mis-matching angles.
For remote power, we used a standard 12 volt car battery purchased just for this purpose, hooked up to one of those little Radio Shack-esque inverters that allows you to plug in one or two electrical devices and run them for hours on end. We set up a boom box as near to water’s edge as possible and blasted the final mix of “Three Little Nuns” over and over and over again as the actresses sang along and performed the crazy good dance moves created by Amy Jordan, our Choreographer extraordinaire. (And extra kudos to Amy as well for sporting the skimpiest of bikinis, so the oft-naked actresses wouldn’t feel like they were the only ones being exposed.)
At my request, the musicians had added a full minute of additional music in the midst of “Three Little Nuns” to cover a brief scene in which our Heroines encounter a cute little Zombie Dog swimming nearby…a critical plot point in the story. For the role of the Zombie Dog, I snagged my ex-wife’s chubby little Pug, Mabel. Early in the day, when we first arrived at the lake, Mabel took off running and swimming and playing with Bessa, herself a fuzzy bundle of energy who owns one of our key crewmembers, Sunday Ballew.
Since we were doing everything in chronological order because of the sun, we didn’t reach the introduction of the Zombie Dog until late in the day. While we’d been shooting, Mabel had been running and playing and swimming…and running and playing and swimming some more. Finally, it was time to bring Mabel in for her scene--and the poor little thing was so freakin’ tired she could barely stand, much less swim and run maniacally after the actresses like a fearsome Zombie Dog she was supposed to be.
Even so, we made heroic efforts to coax Mabel to do things like sprint out of the water onto the bank in full-pursuit of our Heroines. But Mabel did little more than waddle out of the lake, half-heartedly shake herself dry and then curl up to go to sleep. It would’ve been comical if it wasn’t so dispiriting…since we REALLY needed her to appear at least somewhat energized and ferocious in order to sell the jeopardy of the scene.
This was perhaps the biggest lesson learned on the day: if you’re working with animals, work ‘em early, while they’re still fresh, rather than let ‘em exhaust themselves before they’re even called to the set. Well, at least we got everything else we needed for the opening. As the sun slipped beneath the horizon, we slogged back through the muck to our vehicles and returned home looking and feeling more like Zombies than Humans.
FOOTNOTE: several weekends later, I made a return trip out to the same lake location with Sunday, Jessica and Mabel. We grabbed some great 2nd Unit footage of Mabel, who this time around attacked the role of the Zombie Dog with zest. With drive-time and set-up, our little pick-up shoot still took the better part of 5 hours, continually reinforcing in my mind the maxim: Work The Animals First and the Actors Second! (Or is it the other way around?!)
BONUS FOOTNOTE: it had been a long day at the lake for everybody present for the “Three Little Nuns” scene. Virtually all nine cast and crewmembers were in the water from 11 am until nearly 7 pm. During this almost 8-hour stretch, not one person EVER got out of the lake and found a bush or something in order to go to the bathroom. When I mentioned this observation on our next shooting day, one and all strongly denied peeing in the lake. And I’m thinking, most people have to pee after a mere 15-minute shower…but not one of these good people had to go after being immersed in water for a whole day? Most curious. Of course, when somebody then asked me if I’d peed in the lake during our shoot, I quickly found some directorial activity or another with which to busy myself…hell, I don’t have time for such 3rd-grade trivialities, I’m trying to make Art here!
The next weekend saw us once more going mano-a-mano against a substantial Giant, our major, show-stopping number, “Zomburbia”, which featured all of the principals in the picture along with 20+ Zombie townspeople. This was by far our most Extras-intensive day and also included our biggest, longest dance number--once more amazingly choreographed by the multi-talented Amy Jordan.
We were especially fortunate in landing the perfect location for the homestead of the Honorary Mayor of Zomburbia, where this number (and numerous smaller scenes) would take place. Castmembers Matt and June Julian put their large, 2-story house at our disposal. The property featured sprawling front and backyards where large numbers of people could dance, and was located 600 feet outside Austin City Limits, meaning the Location Police couldn’t touch us even if they’d known where we were.
The weekends since then have been a blur of driving down unfamiliar streets looking for the day’s location…of packing and unpacking the hundreds of pounds of production gear necessary for each shoot…hours of applying and unapplying Zombie make-up…last-second dance rehearsals…finding just the right prop for a scene…and, somewhere along the way, shooting a crazy bit where one of our Leads throws up right on the camera!
Since Z: A ZOMBIE MUSICAL adheres to strict Aristotelian rules of drama, the entire action in the story occupies exactly one day--from one dawn to the next. We deliberately shot virtually all the daytime scenes first to take advantage of the extended hours provided by Daylight Savings Time. Now we’re in the process of transitioning to night shoots, which present their own fun and their own obstacles, not least the opportunity to apply our own distinctive lighting scheme to the show rather than relying on Helios alone to illuminate our characters.
Another advantage of shooting nights is we now get to sleep in on Saturday and Sunday, with call times usually coming at about 4 o’clock in order to be set-up and made-up in time to start shooting when the sun goes down at 5:30 p or so.
Next up: more about the logistics and challenges of tilting at windmills after dark, along with a belated discussion of storyboarding and another tune from Z: A ZOMBIE MUSICAL.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to weigh in with your opinions or questions, feel free to contact me anytime. (NOTE: I only get about 4-5 mass e-mails every single day of the week from desperate local Acting Teachers dunning the Austin-area acting populace to attend their silly little classes so they can cover their rent for this month. So if you’re an Acting Teacher--or just wanna pretend to be one--please send me as many e-mails as possible about your “life-changing” classes. Who knows, I might just sign up in order to generate more comic material?!)
