We went back to the multi-story carpark and with haste we commenced shooting, as one of us had to rush off to work after.

You might think it’s really easy to act as a zombie or mimic one, but when it comes to directing, plotting, or choreographing how a zombie should move, act, walk, maybe even talk, it requires quite a lot of thinking. Personally, I’ve not seen enough zombie films or The Walking Dead episodes to act, let alone, direct someone to be a zombie. Thankfully with Helen and Trong on board, they gave some really relevant details on how Reza should move, walk, or stand. In our previous shoot, there wasn’t much directing, since it was just merely a chase and I think Reza pulled off the zombie chase pretty convincing. However, for this shoot, we had to think how a zombie would act, react, how did the 2 interact or come into contact…

I know all these should have been figured out in pre-production, but since this shoot was planned like just 2 days before the actual day of the shoot, we had not much time to work with in terms of the story board. What we did cover though, was the shots we needed to add on to the current chase scene we have. Hence, that was our main motive, and gave us a list of questions that should be answered on screen. The video below might illustrate our little discussion on how we went through things. Of course, we had to go through a couple of rehearsals before actually going for a take.

  1. How did the chase begin?
  2. What was Helen doing?
  3. What was Reza doing?
  4. How did the both of them meet?
  5. Are there other people?
  6. How did Reza become a zombie?

Some of these questions got omitted, as we think it would have been obvious or we just couldn’t afford the time to explain it on screen due to the 22.5-30 seconds screener. Since each of us are entitled to 22.5 seconds, we decided to submit two, 45 seconds to 1 minute videos from our group. Trong and Helen will be screening their experiments done at Trong’s apartment with the beautifully shot of dirty dishes, gory hand movements and more, while Reza and I would be concentrating on this chase scene sticking to our initial concept, with the help of Trong and Helen, of course.

Back to “how to direct a zombie”, we had to brainstorm how Helen discovers Reza is a zombie and we came up with two approaches. Either Reza stalks Helen, and the chase begins, or Helen sees Reza just idling at a corner being “zombie-like” and approaches to offer help, and then the chase begins.

We settled for the latter, as it would establish both characters best under the short given amount of screen time. Recounting back to the days when I was playing Left4Dead, zombies are usually idling, stoning, or doing nothing much until somebody startles them or approaches them, and we were trying to remake that, but instead of being a computer game, it was in film.

On a side note, I think music plays heavy with this particular sequence. The suspense of Helen approaching Reza, unaware of him being a zombie will be amplified even more with some suspense music to thrill and excite the audience. I’ll be liaising close with my mate in Singapore to compose a piece that would fit the sequence.