5.18.2009
ZA Blasts Off at Motor City Comic Con!
by Ryan Thompson

So...Motor City Comic Con was AWESOME!

That's (from left) composer and sound designer David Fienup, director/producer/DP/editor/yadda yadda Ryan Thompson, Reggie Bannister giving away free Faygo, the adorable booth babe Erin McGylnn, and author Matt O'Day rocking the ZA booth.

Thanks to everybody who came down to show their fanaticism for all things Zombie Apocalypse! Incredibly, we completely sold out of the brand-new prequel comic book on the second day and sold just heaps of DVDs. It was great meeting many of you personally. Looking forward to meeting the rest of you at a convention sometime in the near future!

The whole experience has been extremely encouraging to the core ZA team and I'm tripling my efforts to expand the franchise...and get that second movie going!

In case you didn't get a chance to make it down yourself, or were disappointed that the comics were already sold out, fear not! I'm ordering another run and will be able to sell them on the internet shortly. The Zombie Apocalypse Issue 0 book will also be available on www.ComiXpress.com before too long.

Also, keep checking the website here. I'm planning on whole slew of updates, including a "reviews" section, an option to sign up for a mailing list, to join the Facebook group (called simply "Zombie Apocalypse"), to follow us on Twitter, and gobs of other cool stuff.

Until next time, zombie fans!

--RT

Hey zombie fans!

The world of Zombie Apocalypse just keeps getting bigger and more exciting. In the long gap since we last spoke, I've been hard at work putting together not only a feature-packed Special Edition DVD of the movie, but alongside artist Brian Sheehy and writer Matt O'Day a Graphic Novel series! Yup, that's right - a Zombie Apocalypse comic book!

The Special Edition DVD not only features an epic new case, but contains over 30 minutes of deleted scenes, 4 commentary tracks (from sound designer and composer David Fienup, writer Adam Goron, and myself), and the theatrical trailer! I also updated the movie slightly, with tweaked titles, credits, and a really awesome new DVD menu. It will be sold for the same price as the original edition - just 15 bucks.

The Graphic Novel may be the thing I'm the most excited about, though. Zombie Apocalypse: Issue 0 will be released this weekend and chronicles the events leading up to the beginning of the movie. Find out where Miller and Agent Net met, why the zombies were created...and who was responsible in this 12-page full-color serial! The book will retail for just $3.

Both the Special Edition DVD and Zombie Apocalypse: Issue 0 are going to be released this weekend (May 15-17) at the Motor City Comic Convention in Novi, Michigan. Tickets are just $20 for one day, or $45 for the whole weekend. There's a lot of great guests on the lineup!! Check out www.motorcityconventions.com for more information.

 

Since it's premiere Zombie Apocalypse has made its way across the internet on several zombie-centric blogs! Check out the generous coverage at:

Quiet Earth - Dedicated to Genre Film and All Things Post-Apocalyptic. These guys have great taste in movies.

Blog of the Living Dead - A Sweedish zombie movie blog! ZA has gone international!

I've sent screener copies to these sites, so check back for their reviews! Also, if you personally run a horror film website, or have a favorite blog or message board you frequent, shoot me an e-mail and let's get Zombie Apocalypse out there!

Also, I want to send a very special thanks to the three of you who already bought copies! Your DVDs are in the mail.

-Ryan Thompson

Finally, almost two years to the day, Zombie Apocalypse is complete and ready to be screened to the masses! The guys over at The Drunken Zombie Podcast stumbled across ZA and have enthusiastically accepted it to screen at their Horror Double Feature at Willow Knolls Theater in Peoria Illinois October 9th! If you want to go, it's at:

4100 W Willow Knolls Dr
Peoria, IL 61615
October 9th, 7:00 PM. Tickets just $10!

I will personally be at the show with a slew of the other guys behind Zombie Apocalypse including audio geniuses David Fienup and Bill Jones, special effects artist Juston Espinoza, and whoever else we can cram into the car! We're going to be doing a Q&A session after the screening too, which should be a riot. I can't wait to see how people respond to ZA, and to check out the other movie showing, It's My Party and I'll Die if I Want To, which might have the best title. Ever.

I'll be bringing as many ZA DVDs as I can print as well, which will be for sale for the low low price of only $10! If you're a superfan, I might even autograph it for you! I'm also going to bring copies of Vito Power, a hillarious short I produced and shot. It's laugh-out-loud funny - grab a copy if you make the show!

I can't believe it's finished. But something tells me this is just the beginning...

-Ryan Thompson

7.20.2008 - The Sound of Zombie Apocalypse:
A note from Sound Designer, ADR Recordist, boom-op, SFX producer, dialogue editor, and composer David Fienup

What do you get when you combine difficult to record locations, 10 gallons of fake blood, 30 crew members, 8 actors, hundreds of extras, and 20 hour shoots 3 days in a row every weekend for over a month (oh yeah, and almost no budget)? Lots of post-production! Zombie Apocalypse is the first film I ever worked on. Or, I should say: it was the first one I started working on, and then worked on a bunch of others while I was still working on it, and now I'm trying to help finish it up... This has been an immense and amazing project from the start because so many people have put in so much time on this film, and we all worked for food, energy drinks, and chemical masks (cue laughter from the crew). Everyone was dedicated to making a zombie film, and that's all we cared about. We didn't care about the aches and pains, the possibility of emphysema, lead poisoning, rabies, or death brought on by accidental stabbing. And we all survived with very few accidental deaths, hehe. No, really, no one died.

On to the audio.

Live recording was a challenge mostly because I had never done it on a movie set (that's what she said, I know). Concerts and recitals used to be my thing. Movie sets are a whole other world. For one thing there's a whole different set of challenges. You wouldn't believe how much noise ice machines, generators, refrigerators, heating/cooling systems produce when you're really listening. Most of the time you walk into a bar, and there's music playing. Now I know why: to cover all that crappy noise. Plus, and as good as they were, there's a whole crew of antsy people filled with coffee and energy drinks, who haven't slept more than three hours in the last 3 days standing around, waiting to hear the word "cut" so they can jump into action... Needless to say we had to ADR our whole bar scene.

Sound effects (SFX) are a key element to this movie. Many of the ones originally used were from standard SFX libraries that Ryan Thompson had access too. They were ok, but we really wanted to amp up the movie and take it to the next level. So, Ryan and I did a nice little foley session in the attic of the "Prospect Manor", as it's known to party-goers. He and I had both watched a special feature (maybe on the History Channel or Discovery) about sound design and special effects for the Indiana Jones movies. Boy, was that helpful. I ended up recording Ryan beating the hell out of a pile of leather jackets with a baseball bat for punching sounds. Must be very therapeutic. We also beefed up some of the hits with the sound of an old chest being slammed shut. Listen carefully to the big marauder (Rich Raphael) as he swings his elbows around. You might just hear the lock clank. To really make some of the punches snap, we added in a stock sound of a whip crack. Add them all together at the right levels, and PRESTO! You've got a "Hollywood" punch.

There's a lot more I could say about the SFX, but I'll leave you with this bit of info: some of the sound effects are very life-like, some of them are almost old-kung-fu-movie-esque, and some are pretty much straight up goofy. I hope you like the variety. They aren't all perfect, but they get the job done.

Music is my passion. I have spent many years writing music, and in the past 4 or 5 I've been recording a lot of my own music. The challenges with writing for film is the variety of different styles you need to call upon, and the constraints of the action, timing, etc that the already-shot-and-edited-film presents to you. This was one of the biggest and best challenges of my life (so far). Throughout Zombie Apocalypse I take you on an adventure with a variety of characters who each have their own personalities and styles. They are presented with a variety of situations, each of which has it's own level of emotion, drama, and sheer bad-assness. I wanted to highlight these elements by giving some of them their own theme music. Miller, Net, Kevin, Mark & Tom, and the Marauders all have their own themes. Sorry Raven, but you didn't really have any moments of glory on your own... But you still kicked some zombie ass!

For Miller, I wanted to try and make him such a bad-ass that it was almost ridiculous. Cue the blaring guitars and the "thunder drums". Growing up on 80's hair-metal helped here.

Net, being the evil villain and also a bad-ass, was given blaring lapsteel along with church organs, and a harpsichord. However, he gets a little more hip-hopish music when he's being a bad-ass and tracking Miller and Raven. He's a very sneaky cat. Cue the "Snoop Dogg Bass" and the break-beats.

Mark & Tom are kind of cool, normal-joe's, so they got a pretty cool funky rock song that seems to follow them around in slightly different variations. They love listening to local Grand Rapids bands while they're doing homework, and local Ann Arbor bands when they're cruisin' for a bruisin'... or a beer.

Kevin's theme and the Marauder's theme were a lot of fun to work on. Ryan really wanted something like the "nazi theme" from Indiana Jones. So, I did something of a sound-a-like, but in my own style. These guys are just a bunch of survivors who happened to have joined forces as a kind of militia against the undead. So, in a way they're kind of a goofy bunch of dudes who love to think they're bad-ass, and so will you. They got their own orchestrated themes. Both use original melodies, with accompaniment that might drum up memories of Police Academy or The Naked Gun. There are also times in the movie when the orchestra is bombarded with blaring guitar, and in a few instances we hear just the guitar playing the Marauder's theme.

The over all sound design is slightly outrageous. We amped up the movie with SFX, blaring guitars, etc. Some of the best scenes (in my opinion) are very lightly orchestrated with vintage Moog synthesizer playing overly dramatic music. Near the end of the movie we even get a "sound-alike", cheesy Moog synth reminiscent of Scarface (when Tony takes over the business, gets the coke-head girlfriend montage). You'll have to watch the movie for more surprises. They're around every turn.

I hope that when this movie is completed you will enjoy watching and listening to it as much as I've enjoyed working on it. For all the time that people have put into this film for no cash reward, we put together one hell of a sweet feature-length film. This movie goes out to anyone who has ever done something difficult and time consuming just because they truly love doing it.

Peace and gore,

Dave "the sound guy" Fienup

This may be old news for some of you, but a rough cut of Chapter 2 and one scene of Chapter 3 was shown December 1st at my birthday party. The majority of the cast was there including Michael Harthen, Michael Empson, Matthew King, Devin Cameron and Hannah Gaff. Of course they were having a good time watching the movie, but I was paying much more attention to a couple of younger guys I had never seen before. They had no idea what this movie was, who was in it, and who made it, but they were loving every minute of it. By the end of the rough cut one of them stood up and said, and I quote, "It was zombified! It was apocalyptic! There was knives and guns and violent shit! I loved it!" I can see that going on the back of the box.

The feedback from the rough cut screening was exremely helpful. While it wasn't very direct - it just wasn't the place for it - I'm making numerous changes based on people's reaction. I've seen the movie a hundred times, so I watched people's faces instead. One scene that I was 99% sure I was going to cut is now staying based on the amount of laughs it got, while another that I was on the fence about is being cut for sure - people just stopped paying attention. I will definitely be doing more of these screenings as the edit progresses. I don't want to create a movie that I'm thrilled about, but nobody else is going to enjoy. This movie is for you guys!

School has been a priority over the last few weeks for myself and much of the ZA crew, as we've been scrambling at the buzzer to get our final film projects turned in on time. This deadline turned out to greatly help the Zombie Apocapylse post production team as Joe Zook, desperately looking for a subject for his After Effects class final project, voluenteered to add some muzzle flashes and blood to the movie! I haven't seen any clips yet, but I hear from his classmates that he's doing a fantastic job. Clinton Jones is also officially back working his visual effect magic on the second two chapters of ZA. I just sent him his first scene and cannot wait to see what this whiz can do with it. Clint and Joe will also be going back and adding additional effects and fixes to Chapter 1.

Composer and sound guru David Fienup is going to be spending a couple of days with me here in Grand Rapids finalizing music and preparing sound effects. It'll be fun to be able to work with him face-to-face for a change - we've been working over e-mail for the last few months, and while it's been very effective, its always more enjoyable bouncing ideas off somebody else right there in the studio.

Oh! And how about that teaser trailer, eh? You can now watch that again in the Previews section along with the Chapter 1 promo video.

-Ryan Thompson

11.6.2007 - Post Production Progress

Since Zombie Apocalypse’s wrapping in July, I’ve been spending all my spare time editing - which hasn’t been much.  Voluenteering for the Grand Rapids Community Media Center, Open Concept Gallery, and The Haunt, as well as getting Lynx Media Productions up and running has put a dent in my post-production productivity, but I’m back in the swing of things now.  Now with my new Mountain Dew powered nocturnal editing schedule, the movie is coming along extremely well.

Current task – sound effects.

First thing yesterday morning I showed Matt King some punch, kick, ricochet, splat, stab, slash, squish, and scream effects I had been working on.  The punch sound effects during Axel’s battle with the zombies drew exclamations of, “Outrageous!” from Matt, which is a reaction that could go either way.  He then went on to clarify “These sound like they’re out of a Bruce Lee movie.”  We decided that ridiculous sound effects like these ultimately compliment the over-the-top tone of the movie, but something was still off.  Maybe in the mix?  I went to an expert.

Adam Goron and I met to tweak his current film, Satori, and afterwards watched the  rough cut of the twelve minutes of absurd action at the end of Chapter 2.   “Some of the kung-fu punches might have to go,” he said between laughs, “but maybe with music...I think they could work with music.”  I agreed. I can't wait until Fienup lays down a track for these scenes.

Late last night Scott Watson and I screened the most recent rough cut, which goes for one hour and twenty minutes not including Chapter 1.  We both had a great time watching the thing, cheering at the cheese and discussing changes and possibilities.  “I think the action sequences are really well edited,” he said. “It’s fun seeing all these shots cut together.  I rarely get to see the editing process.  This is exciting for me.”  With that, we went and cut a good seven shots from the climatic battle scene effectively speeding it up. It's almost up to speed.

I left the office yesterday feeling extremely positive about Zombie Apocalypse.  The collaboration and feedback from so many people is what’s made this movie possible and keeps driving me to get it done.  This has been fun, and we’re all going to have a great time with the final product.

-Ryan Thompson