We return to the independent film mecca of Austin, TX, where we’re following the exploits of the production of Z--a sexy, silly Zombie Musical by John McLean, who previously foisted the nutty, low-budget mockumentary, THE PERFECT MAN CONTEST, upon an unsuspecting world.
NOTE: THIS WEEK’S “LIGHTS! CAMERA! ZOMBIES!” COLUMN IS RATED Z: FOR ZOMBIE NUDITY. BACK AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER IF YOU ARE UNDER 18 OR IF YOUR SENSIBILITIES DO NOT TOLERATE THE SIGHT OF THE UNCLOTHED INHUMAN BODY!
It’s been a busy fortnight here in Zombietown, USA--what with Make-Up tests, cast/crew auditions and the shooting of two separate trailers for Z. So let’s jump right into it…
Some months ago, my brilliant, long-suffering girlfriend, Shawn O’Connell, signed on to design the Zombie make-up for Z. (Shawn figured, perhaps rightly, that the only way she was gonna get to see me while Z was being made was to roll up her sleeves and join the creative team!)
We’d previously done some partial make-up tests, but now we really needed to do a few full-body applications to determine how well Shawn’s concoction of tempera and acrylic paints, texture medium and suchlike would hold up in the real world. Especially since my Zombies will often be singing and dancing, not to mention cavorting, gamboling about and generally engaging in on-screen shenanigans--any and all of which can be hard on make-up!
To that end, last week we invited our friend Kelli Cook, an actress and model, to drive down from Dallas to become a Zombified Guinea Pig.
To apply all 5 layers of make-up over virtually every square inch of Kelli’s body took Shawn a little over an hour…which time must needs be dramatically reduced before we actually start shooting. Hell, some of the larger song & dance scenes in Z will feature 20+ Zombies, so streamlining the make-up process and eventually employing an air-brush for the base layers is de rigueur--since we can’t exactly stand around for 20+ hours waiting for the talent to get ready!
With Kelli’s make-up complete, we took a bunch of digital pics for the ancillary, “Release Your Inner Zombie” marketing campaign for Z, then released her for one of the most important parts of the make-up process…getting it off again!
In our early tests, Shawn had used a latex base, but we quickly ruled that out because a) latex is fairly expensive and we were gonna be needing a LOT of it; b) latex is super-difficult to remove--with a tendency to cling tenaciously to every single little hair on the body, including places you didn’t even know you HAD hairs!
Whereas the tempera/acrylic/texture medium make-up we’re currently experimenting with washes right off in the shower. And since virtually all of our actors will have day jobs and can’t be walking around with little chunks of Zombie make-up for days on end, ease of removal is an important part of the entire process.
TRAILERUS MAXIMUS
The next day I picked up all the gear from my production partner, Trant Batey, another local filmmaker and actor. Between the two of us, we own the cameras, lights, mikes, sound boards, extension cords and every other essential piece of gear to shoot an entire independent feature. We pass the equipment back and forth, depending on who’s shooting what, and even loan out the gear to other local filmmakers at no charge when neither of us are using it.
Principal Photography hasn’t yet begun on Z, natch, but I still wanted to create a Trailer or two to give potential cast/crewmembers an idea of the Look & Feel of the picture…as well as to have something cool to put up on our official website when it goes lives in the next week or so.
My first Trailer concept was to do a riff on Hamlet’s infamous soliloquy, “To Be or Not to Be…”, changing out Shakespeare’s text to my own nefarious ends.
Thus was born, “To Z or Not to Z…”, which would feature “Hamlet” delivering an updated monologue in a cemetery while clutching poor Yorick’s skull. I enlisted my pal, Rommel Sulit, an architect by day and damn fine actor/playwright by night, to play Hamlet. Shawn suggested I add Ophelia wandering forlornly in the Background…and then have her be accosted by a Naked Female Zombie and transmogrified into the Living Undead. (Yeah, you read that right--my own girlfriend proposed ADDING a gratuitous naked Zombie chick to the trailer…is she a Keeper or what?!)
I tapped Kelli to play Ophelia and drafted a talented actress new to Austin named Michelle Keefer to play the aforementioned Zombie Chick. As it happens, our house butts up against a sprawling wooded area and I was able to create a make-shift cemetery set virtually in our own backyard.
It’s been some months since I’d shot anything, so I opted for a crew of just one other person so there’d be more for me to do. (Seriously, there’s nothing like the raw fun of getting own your hands on the production equipment and setting shit up and moving shit around until it’s just right…and then getting the shot and moving it all over again. It’s therapeutic in some nutty-ass way.)
The Zombie make-up took less time to apply on this second night--so we’re going in the right direction there--and it held up well through the several hours of shooting on an uncommonly cold night.
I’d been casting about for a Director of Photography for Z, but hadn’t yet found anybody who’s both talented AND available this summer, so I played DP myself on this shoot…and, I must admit, I got hooked! As DP, you get to paint the canvas of the frame with lights and images, and it’s such a critical, creative part of the process that I was dumbfounded as to why I ever let other people do the job for me in the past. A number of well-established directors light and shoot their own pictures--James Cameron, Caleb Deschaniel and, most famously, Robert Rodriguez, among them.
In the end, I got exactly the look and feel I wanted of the “creepy” cemetery where Hamlet is brooding and Ophelia is being accosted by a Zombie Chick, and now feel emboldened to keep going down this road of shooting my own footage.
TO WIDESCREEN OR NOT TO WIDESCREEN…
Just to make things more complicated--and therefore more interesting--I also opted to shoot “To Z or Not to Z…” widescreen.
This was a good idea in theory, and it was fun to pull off, but in retrospect it probably wasn’t the best choice for the trailer--since the primary outlet for the finished product will be a little QuickTime movie on our website. After compressing the footage and playing it back at only 15 frames-per-second, much of the image resolution is lost…and surrendering a good 1/3 of the frame to black bars just makes the finished product appear that much harder to view.
But, you know, live and learn!
I captured the footage and cut it together, as usual, with Final Cut Pro 3--a copy I TOTALLY paid for myself, and NOT some Cracked copy borrowed from another Austin filmmaker…or at least that’s my story when the Software Piracy Police come knocking at the door in their little blue uniforms and cock-eyed hats--and exported the finished product as a QuickTime movie.
The first Trailer for Z was done!
But I wanted more…and more! As any Director will admit when pressed…the hoo-ha surrounding writing and casting and pre-production is all well and good, but life really begins once the camera’s rolling. Recording sound and picture on film or tape is the Crack Pipe of Creativity, and you wanna do it again and again until you Get It Just Right…which, of course, is Never!
So I quickly conceived another trailer. This one would feature--for no good reason, really--three Naked Zombie Chicks dancing in the woods to the tune of the “Living Undead”, the bad-ass final number in Z, with high-energy music composed by local boy genius, Troupe Gammage…who’s all of 16 years old!
TAKING ON WATER
On the morning of production on the follow-up Trailer, however, the bottom started to drop out. First, I got a voice message from Michelle Keffer--whom I ‘d really, really wanted for one of the three Leads in Z--saying she was dropping out of the entire picture.
She didn’t give any reasons, but I assumed it was because of the naked-osity. Going into the “To Z or Not to Z…” shoot, she was totally cool with the idea of running around wearing nothing but Zombie make-up, but after getting a taste of the Real Deal as a background player in the she must’ve felt differently.
Which is cool. It’s her body, her career, her choice. (Of course, if I never cast her again, that’s my career, my choice, eh?!) (And, honestly, what’s the point of being an Artist if you can’t act like a petulant 10 year-old from time-to-time?!)
SO, THAT HAPPENED…
Later that same morning, my girlfriend Shawn--slated to be another one of the dancing Zombie Chicks--informed me that with all the recent shoots and make-up tests and working seemingly 100 hours per week as a Restaurant Manager, she hadn’t had time to exercise in weeks and decided she wasn’t gonna appear in the trailer in less than decent shape. So she was out as well.
Having recently had my first naked acting experience in the UT short, PAPER BALLS, I totally understood how she felt. But now I was in a pickle. I had only one Zombie Dancer left--the always game Kelli Cook--and I had the set all prepped, the production gear in hand and had even borrowed a cool little toy called a Cobra Crane for the shoot.
Zeus-dammit, I was gonna shoot SOMETHING that night!
I mean, have you ever played with a Cobra Crane? It’s a deceptively simple piece of equipment, yet it allows an impressive range of motion. You can shoot low or high, as well as pan and even zoom while you’re moving from one position to another in the shot. For under $300--or even less, if you can get someone else to buy it and then just borrow it from them now and again, which is how I like to operate!--you can add fluid motion and serious production value to your project.
Well, filmmaking is as much about damage control as anything else, so I put on my Thinking Cap and settled down over a bottomless cup of coffee at my favorite coffee house, emerging hours later with the caffeine shakes and a reasonable solution.
My new Story for the trailer would go like this: a lone Zombie Chick is dancing to music in the woods. A rogue Zombie Dude foraging through the woods stumbles upon her. He gets caught up in her enthusiasm and dances with her for a while…and then together they set off for a fine dinner of Human Meat. As I say, simple and workable.
Since it was now only a couple of hours until the shoot, it was too late to find another actor to play the Zombie Dude, so I stepped into the role myself. Regrettably, since the completion of my little nudie short a few weeks ago, I’d completely fallen off the wagon of vigorous exercise and salads morning, noon and night, and certainly wasn’t looking MY best, either. But I figured that with a babelicious woman on-screen with me at the same time, nobody in their right mind was even gonna bother looking at me in any case, huh?
The shoot went smoothly, with one semi-regret…because I was acting in the trailer, I had to turn over most of the fun of playing with the Cobra Crane to Shawn.
Towards the end of the evening, we discovered the easy-on, easy-off Zombie make-up we were using was, well, a little TOO easy-off! What with the dancing and undressing and all, noticeable swathes of the make-up had been rubbed completely away--something for us to address and fix pronto. Maybe Embalming Fluid will help preserve the Zombie Look through each day’s shoot?!
Here’s the results of the “Dance Video” trailer. (Again, keep in mind this is Z-Rated and NOT for minors or prudish types!)
Traditionally, trailers rarely use original material, created before the fact…but rather consist of footage cobbled together well after Principal Photography is complete. But I like the idea of making a few original trailers as you go along, so your future audience can get the flavor of it hot, as T.S. Eliot phrased it.
Plus these quick shoots are fantastic ways to audition crewmembers and actors in a practical environment. (I’m MUCH happier that Michelle, say, dropped out of the show at this early stage than after we’d been shooting for a week or three!)
COMING UP…
Buddha willing, the Official Z Website will be up in time for the next column--and I’ll describe its creation, along with some other fun stuff we’ve got coming up in the days ahead, include a trailer spoofing Nike commercials called, “Just Z It!”
In the meantime, feel free to CONTACT
me anytime with questions, suggestions and/or offers to lend us any fancy-ass production equipment for Z!
