For the past 4 years we’ve seen Zomblogalypse grow to be one of the most entertaining zombie web series you could watch. Honestly I’ve always loved the show and now via IndieGoGo you can see the web series be turned into a feature length film!
Three friends, a flat, some zombies…
Hi! We’re Tony, Hannah and Miles and we’ve been making the comedy zombie web series Zomblogalypse in the fair city of York, UK, since 2008.
Four and a bit years, thousands of fans and hundreds of thousands of online views later, the series has come to the point we always dreamed of from the start: MAKING A MOVIE! The script is priming, the stage is setting for York to be filled with brain-hungry deadheads and we’re raring to splatter them into oblivion for your entertainment.
As you’ll read below, we’re already getting interest from backers for the movie and now we’re on the cusp of securing a serious budget to make a serious film. Well, to make a silly film seriously. We’re taking the script to agents and distributors at the Cannes Film Festival in May to wheel and deal… but we need YOUR HELP to get through the wheeling and dealing required so that we can get to the ‘making the movie’ stage.
If you’re a fan of Zomblogalypse, now is your time to shine. This is our Helm’s Deep, this is our Waterloo. If you believe in us and want to show it and have our love forever, THE TIME IS NOW!
Cast your peepers over the words and images below and learn how your involvement could range from helping the film come about, to actually joining us on our adventures. There’s never been a better time: York needs Zomblog, and we need you!Tony, Miles and Hannah, aka The Zombloggers x
We want to tell you a story…
Four years ago three friends called Hannah, Tony and Miles started calling themselves MilesTone Films (www.milestonefilms.co.uk) and shot a zero budget comedy web series called Zomblogalypse (www.zomblogalypse.com). It unceremoniously dumped three friends that also happened to be called Hannah, Tony and Miles in a little flat in York many months after a zombie apocalypse, posting video blogs to pass the time.
Hannah knitted and hid in the bath, Tony ate beans and fashioned odd weapons whilst Miles delivered sarcastic witticisms as the trio worked their way through shopping trips, awkward dinner parties with rival survivor-bloggers and locking themselves permanently out of their flat.
Mining a very British flavoured humour of decided indifference in the face of disaster that celebrated and sent up the zombie genre in equal measures, the zero budget web series picked up a dedicated cult following. Filmnet said it was hilarious, SFX liked it, series views headed cheerfully into hundreds of thousands and inspired a great many late night discussions and a barely whispered ambition;
“What if we could make a Zomblogalypse feature film?â€
True, it started out shooting on a web cam and all the zombies were just good mates painted green, but by the fourth season all kinds of amazingly talented people had piled aboard. Green painted friends developed professional acting careers and turned into rotting veiny corpse things at the hands of make up artists in-between projects like The Dark Knight and Doctor Who. Someone discovered the presets on After Effects and the original trio were making feature films themselves like CrimeFighters that Empire, Time Out and Sight & Sound were hurling praise at…
At the other end of the country a guy called Steve and some of his friends had started calling themselves Coffee Films (www.coffeefilms.com), and after spending most of the 90s shooting random experimental and documentary films on bad camcorders headed into the 00s making a bunch of award winning experimental, thriller and dramatic short films on slightly better camcorders.
After a random two year tangent into wildlife documentary filmmaking, they entered into an epic five year, half-a-million-dollar shoot on the highly anticipated Killing Joke music documentary The Death and Resurrection Show.
As that finally wound up post production and prepared for international theatrical release in late 2013, Steve started developing some new feature projects and got to thinking how much he liked his friend Miles’ web series Zomblogalypse, they talked and both said;
“Let’s make a Zomblogalypse feature film!â€
Throughout 2012, the four lobbed script ideas back and forth whilst Hannah, Tony and Miles shot the low budget feature films Amber and Whoops! (releases TBC) and Steve experienced the true meaning of “creative differences†on his music doc and started pitching the Zomblogalypse concept to the film industry.
Converting a series to the long form is notoriously tricky, and all kinds of shapes and forms were poked and pulled at to ensure it didn’t just turn out like a bunch of back to back episodes. The eureka moment came late in the year, took flight like some wonderful flying thing and here we are in Spring 2013 with a feature length script and a burning urgency to make it happen.
Everything that made the series great is there; the humour, the geek references, the love for the genre, beautiful York, the same amazing talents and a bunch of new ones to scale up the special effects, sets, production standards and adventures. It’s Zomblogalypse on a whole new level, re-booted by the people who made it in the first place and ready to be blasé about the end of the world on a whole new level.
So now what?
Financing feature films is rarely simple; you pitch someone something and they want to see the script, you show them the script and they want to meet the director, you introduce them to the director and they want to see THE PACKAGE, and that’s what we need to do.
Packaging a film is about bringing together all kinds of elements so people like film distributors can work out whether they want to give you money and how much it’s going to be. The package usually includes things like a full screenplay, cast and detailed budget, but these days people are also looking for pre-production to already be moving forward with sales estimates, practicality assessments, concept art, concept special effects, concept posters, concept press kits and lots of other things that people in suits like to look at and stroke their chin thoughtfully to.
Plenty of those people in suits thought the idea sounded pretty cool pitching it around at Cannes 2012; the perfect comedic twist in a zombie saturated market. There were even whispers of “trilogy†and “franchiseâ€, but it’s all about THE PACKAGE to get past the whispers to shaking hands, signing things, and finding elaborate ways to paint our friends green yet again.
Zomblogalypse needs you!
Or, more specifically, we need you to help us get there. As the video says, we need to return to Cannes so the suits can meet the creatives and hear their vision, and we also need to get talking to some cool actors about cameo roles, get through the pile of paperwork that ends in budgets and sales estimates and conceive of some concept things before we can get it all in the can and on the screen.
This work has already begun, we’re putting in every spare penny, working beyond the witching hour and abusing overdrafts but we need that bit more for flights, hotels, press kits, castings, concept art, zombie make up design, storyboards, pre-vis and all the little bits that make up THE PACKAGE and get pre-production moving.
£5000 gets us over the finish line with seconds to spare, £7500 would create a package that sparkles so much it blinds and get all the pre-production work happening, and if we’re fortunate enough to stretch beyond that to the £10,000 goal it will pile into the production budget itself.
Through the campaign and beyond, we’ll be posting endlessly, introducing ourselves and our amazing crew, showing you everything we can without giving the story away, and hopefully giving you a feel for what we’re putting together.
We love Zomblogalypse dearly, and printed across 100 sheets of paper is a story at a scale that lets it be everything it can be; an unhealthily large slice of funny, sardonic, British, silly, meme-laden, genre loving, free zombie hugging cinematic entertainment. We can’t wait to show it to you…
Remember to help support the film on IndieGoGo!
