The coming together

And relax.

What a weekend… Saturday was as much fun as I’ve had in as long as I can remember, as we welcomed an insane amount of people to the cast and crew screening of Zombie Resurrection. Cast, crew, zombies, post-production guys, people from the various locations at which we shot the bugger, the guys that did all our set catering, investors, IndieGoGo supporters, mentors, friends and family. All in one place to enjoy 76 minutes of gore-laden sweary silliness.

And it was terrific. 180 people laughing in mostly all the right places, with the freshly-graded film looking and sounding lovelier than it ever has done before. And we got to hang out with a bunch of pals that we hadn’t seen in fourteen months.

Not that anything ever goes completely smoothly. The cinema was hosting the thematically-perfect Third International Death Day Conference beforehand, and when we arrived to set up at 6:00 they were showing no signs of letting up. And bitter experience insists that you’re never beyond the mercies of technical SNAFUs until you hear the last strains of the end-credits.

But when the lights went up at the end of the screening I could smell the stress evaporating.

Sure, it’s a wedding audience – a room filled with people willing the best-man’s speech to be that much funnier than it would otherwise be. Someone would have to be supremely un-classy to go up to a couple of filmmakers at their first screening and berate them for the idiotic way that they’ve wasted two years of their lives, but from my vantage point at the back of the cinema people did genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves. Jake and I lost all sense of perspective on the movie a long time ago, but until we get told differently we’re taking Saturday as an indication that we’ve done something right.

And it was at this point that I may have slightly over-relaxed.

As the audience de-camped back to the bar, and with our responsibilities finally discharged, everything inevitably degenerated into the kind of extended session that my body hasn’t been able to cope with since I was 25. Sat in my flat at 4:00 AM with the last of the stragglers pillaging the forgotten bowels of my booze collection, I should have known that Sunday was going to be a struggle.

But that aside, it’s a massive Charmed thank you again to Christian for organising the cinema, and to everyone that turned up on Saturday night. We wouldn’t be here without all your support and generosity over the last couple of years. You’ve made two happy people really old.

Sadly, photographs from the evening are in short supply (and if you have any good shots please feel free to post them on the Charmed Apocalypse Facebook page), but I did get sent one truly disturbing MMS from my brother yesterday. Blog readers with good memories may remember a rather foolish bet that Jake and I made with each other in January 2011, a bet that we were finally able to make good on last Friday.

So, so wrong. Please don’t this be the only record of an otherwise excellent evening. Muted.

Picking up the pieces

The only thing that you can be 100% sure of in post-production is that no matter how much time you set aside to do something, everything will only come together at the very last moment.

It’s been three weeks since we arranged Saturday’s cast and crew outing to the nicest bit of Hampshire. Three weeks, then, for the very last tweaks to the picture and sound. Extending a zombie growl here, making an exterior shot slightly bluer there. Plenty of time.

And yet, with four days to go, we still haven’t received the graded copy of the film or the final stereo mix-downs. Or, in non-techy speak, ‘all of the pictures’ and ‘all of the sound’.

There must be a secret post-production union somewhere that has guidelines to ensure that movie producers are never allowed to fully de-pucker. Let’s see how badly these filmmakers really want this. Enough to cry on the phone? Enough to open an important artery?

To be clear, it’s not enough to get all the constituent components through on Saturday afternoon and then wander straight in to the cinema. There are a couple of days’ work at our end piecing everything back together again, and this supposes that everything we get in works perfectly first time. It’ll take a good eighteen hours just to crunch the film into a format that the projector likes using my Mac, which the local Apple store recently euphemistically referred to as ‘vintage’. No amount of prayer, whip-cracking or sobbing is going to boost the processor speed.

But we’ve still got four days. Plenty of time. *Clenches*

On the plus side, if everything goes to plan, Saturday night is going to be an extraordinarily entertaining evening. 180 guests, all the principal cast members back together again (with the notable exception of Rachel, who is on tour with a show), and loads of our crew, zombies and investors. And if you’re expecting an invite but haven’t had one through, check your spam directory and get in touch.

And Plan B? Print out ten copies of the screenplay, dig out the costumes from Jake’s attic, boil up a gallon of honey-blood and re-enact the movie live.

Thinking about it, that may actually be quite a lot of fun. Zombie Resurrection – The Musical, anyone? Strained.

How to look good knackered

The cinema is booked, the guests invited, and the fat-lady gargling in anticipation.

Despite my natural pessimism, it turns out that the 17^th November is very much on for Zombie Resurrection’s debutante ball. Three hundred people from the cast, crew, hordes and their significant others, gathered back in Winchester to reacquaint themselves with the zombie apocalypse. It’s going to be an inordinately silly evening, and I can’t wait.

Just under three weeks away. Tick tick tick.

There are still the last few bits and pieces to nail down, but in a break from tradition I am actually allowing myself relax a smidgeon. The tricky stuff is now done, and the potential to be unpleasantly surprised by what we have yet to receive is greatly reduced. At the moment that we signed off the last of the CGI shots we allowed ourselves to believe that home and dry was a formality.

Such hubris, Phelps. Surely there must still be plenty of opportunities for it all to go catastrophically wrong?

Ah – the unknown unknowns. The only constant in the life of a filmmaker. Those arse-biting moments that come out of nowhere to test the resolve and challenge the best laid plans. All you can do is keep your eyes peeled, breath bated, and double the amount of time that you expect every task to take. It’s going to be an interesting three weeks.

But until we get told otherwise, we get to enjoy that rarest of sensations – quiet confidence.

In fact, the mood in Charmed Central is currently so unflappable that we’ve turned our attention to that other outstanding body of work: the making-of documentary for the DVD.

Regular readers may remember the extraordinary aggravation that we had at the start of the process – digitising 21 hours of behind-the-scenes footage, and then struggling to find the most sensible way of getting them so they played OK on a PC. It was an unwelcome distraction from our efforts to get the movie finished, but one that I’m glad we persisted through. Because last week the finished cut of the making-of documentary arrived in our in-boxes from the mighty Chris Marley, complete with intercut footage from the film, actors giving earnest interviews while caked in honey-blood, and some wholly awful chat from Jake and me holding the whole thing together.

And it’s terrific. Terrific in the way that only something that doesn’t have Jake’s and my fingerprints all over it can be.

All those moments from the shoot that I’d forgotten: Danny sitting on a balsa chair and instantaneously turning it to kindling. Shaun-the-boom-op getting wrapped across the back with another stunt chair to celebrate his birthday. Jade losing it mid-interview when a naked pair of buttocks appeared at the back of her shot. Our lovely horde getting painted and gored up. And long sections of various crew members sat around waiting for everybody else to get on with it. One quick re-working from the ever-dependable Dale-the-tunes to lay an authentic Zombie Resurrection musical vibe over the top and we are in business.

And, after watching it back, I genuinely have no idea how we managed to get a film shot at the same time.

But shoot one we did. Better get those RSVPs in for the 17^th November if you don’t believe me. Unwinding.

Glimpses of a brighter beyond

Oh, we are close.

I mean so close that we can almost smell the finish line. It’s a bizarre feeling, like reaching the final chapter in a book that’s taken two years to read. But it has cheered us up somewhat.

On paper, the day-job hasn’t changed too much. We’re still taking daily receipt of the remaining CGI shots, and trading finesses to the sound, music and title sequence with our post-posse, but we are close enough now to the end of the tunnel to know that the light wasn’t a train rushing towards us after all.

The tally: only four remaining CGI shots, 48 tweaks to the sound mix and three minor changes to the titles. By this time next week we should actually have a finished movie. I know I’ve said this before, but this is the first time that I’ve actually believed it myself.

And to think that our initial intention had been to take the finished film to Cannes last May. Only five months late, Phelps. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this represents poor project management, staggering naivety or unwarranted optimism on our part.

We crossed an important threshold last week. There were four bastard CGI shots that had been lurking in the wings for a couple of months, which involved taking out green legs and replacing them with a knotted stump. Despite our best efforts on set to collect all the useful footage of empty frames and replacement elements, making these shots look good was always going to be a challenge. A challenge not improved when the compositor that was working on them suddenly upped and left for Australia, leaving behind only a set of undecipherable scripts on a flavour of software that no one else in the team was using.

So, the shots have sat on a back-burner for a while, thwarting all attempts to plan for activities beyond the end of the film as they waited for someone with the requisite chops to come along.

And then, as if by magic, along he came.

Suddenly our world gets that much brighter. The shots look so damn good now that people are going to be surprised when they find out that actor Joe is actually bi-pedal in real life (and people blessed with the Horror Channel can check this out for themselves tonight at 9:00).

And we relax. Finally.

Our initial approaches to the world’s finest horror festivals have yielded a paltry return, but it does mean we can now start planning the most important screening – showing the movie to the cast, crew and members of our zombie hordes. There are still some logistical issues that need to be ironed out, but what I can say at this point is that it can’t hurt to keep the evening of 17^th November free. And be in Winchester.

That said, the last two years have been a valuable lesson in the perils of counting chickens… better write it in the diary in pencil, eh? Hedging.

Yawn of the Dead

It’s taken a while, but I am now genuinely sick of all things undead.

Fed up, pissed off, irritated and narked. No more runnething over for Andy’s cup. It’s now officially half-empty.

And we are so close to being done. I mean, we're within a gnat’s gland of complete. But why does the last 1% of the work take a ridiculously disproportionate amount of time to finish? With all memories of our last moment of creative excitement firmly in the rear-view mirror, the process has become a struggle for the line.

I guess this isn’t unique to making a movie. A lot of complex projects hit the moment of diminishing returns at some point, where the effort required to make incremental improvements suddenly gets larger and larger. Nothing is ever finished, only abandoned.

Part of my antsiness is plain boredom with the process. We get sent something from someone in our post team. We slot it into the movie. We see / hear whether we like it or not. We send our notes back. We rinse. We repeat. Sure, in and amongst it all, our lists of outstanding issues with the audio and VFX shots are growing steadily smaller, but every day the curve is levelling off further. A slowing trend towards finished, which sits tantalisingly just out of reach.

And perversely, we’ve never been busier. Trips to London to snipe off moments of problematic audio and to swap across data because my provincial broadband is useless. Hours spent analysing why a shot or sample doesn’t work, or trying to translate an emotional reaction into a logical list of fixes. Days when all I do is act as a digital sheep-dog, making sure data goes to the right people and watching blue bars on my laptop slowly climb to 100%.

But actually, my disquiet is probably more to do with that nagging voice at the back of my head telling me I really should be doing something else. I don’t think I’ve learned anything useful about filmmaking for a while, other than skills in diplomacy and project micro-management, and it seems cruelly out of sorts with my experience of the last couple of years. And with the tank of redundancy cash now down to fumes, it’s time to get a proper job, feed the mortgage, and develop a sense of perspective about what the last two years have taught me and what I would do differently if I go round again.

So, no September cast and crew screening, I’m afraid. But definitely October. Unless it’s not. And if you find that frustrating, imagine how I feel. Whining.

Y'all

No holiday to Texas for Jake and Andy. Not this year.

Yesterday the official word finally came back from Fantasic Fest – thanks, but no thanks. It was one of the politest stock email fob-offs that I’ve ever been sent (Texans are renowned for their good manners), but any hope for a world premiere in the Lone Star State is now firmly quashed.

And the mood in Charmed Central? Mostly relief. Relief because the thought of having to craft a completed movie from the current set of best-guess jigsaw pieces over the next few days would spiral both of us into the worst kind of depression. Twenty months into the journey, and putting anything less than gorgeous in front of a paying audience will simply not do.

That’s not to say that we aren’t considerably closer than we were last week. The music is, well… done. The sound is down to the final tweaks and level changes. And a concerted amount of activity has delivered us the bulk of our remaining VFX shots.

But it isn’t finished.

The tally as of six pm today: 116 audio tweaks, six more VFX shots that we have yet to receive, another 38 that need playing with, an almost-there titles sequence and a technical grade that should be ready at the end of the week. But, as we found just before the shoot, it’s the little things that swallow up all the time.

So Jake and I get a couple of weeks reprieve.

Phew! But even so, it’s still a kick in the balls. I’ve never been great at dealing with rejection, although to be fair I don’t take compliments that well either. Fine – it was an early version of the film in super low-res that finally uploaded 36 hours after the cut off, full of green socks, sections of muffled dialogue and a confusing third act. Sure – it’s an American festival and they may not appreciate the British humo(u)r or understand Mac’s Scottish accent. OK – so this is the most prestigious event in the North American horror calendar and we were in competition with a bunch of high-budget offerings with big names and expensive cameras.

But this is the film about the zombie Jesus, people.

So, a small army of post-production elves allow themselves to relax slightly, and a thousand Southern rednecks are denied the opportunity to lynch two limey blasphemers before anyone else gets a chance to. Their loss, it seems.

One down, three more to go. Packing.

Fright-night

If hanging around on a tenterhook is your idea of fun, may I suggest submitting a film to a festival?

With the Texas Fantastic Fest due to kick off on September 20^th, we still haven’t been informed whether we’re in or out. And we aren’t due to get the final word until the 7^th September. That’s a lot of house to get in order in under two weeks: pulling together a press-pack, squeezing the movie onto an HDCAM tape, booking flights, finding a hotel. I mean, Fantastic Fest would be doing quite well just to get all their printing turned around in time.

But this is the way they roll, and until we get told differently we need to keep the testicular cuffs wrapped tightly around our VFX, titles and sound guys. And so far everyone appears squeakily confident.

Not that anything ever works perfectly first time. There was a trite project management sound-bite that my last employers used to bandy around – failing to plan means planning to fail. But actually, I find planning to fail a much safer default. If we ask for stuff a few days ahead of when we actually need it, it means that when the inevitable internet issues and incomplete deliveries push everything past the deadline, it doesn’t automatically drop us in the shit.

And with the Charmed-imposed finishing date of the 7^th September looming large, we had a bonus moment this week to reflect on our progress. The FrightFest screener.

God, I love FrightFest. What better way to spend a glorious summer bank-holiday weekend than sat in a dark room ploughing through a mountain of gore and monsters? It means I can switch of that nagging voice that tries to tell me to get off my arse and head outdoors and make the most of whatever fleeting sunshine there is. Hey, I paid good money for the opportunity to sit indoors, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Five days, 35 films, ten KFC meals and five late night boozing sessions amongst the horror faithful.

Heaven. And, yes – I do realise that FrightFest just happened last weekend. Without Jake, me or Zombie Resurrection in attendance.

Not this year, sadly. A mix of catastrophically depleted personal funds, an evolving production diary that doesn’t allow us to plan time-off more than a week in advance, and all the work involved in getting another cut of the film together.

But there is another. The FrightFest Halloween all-nighter. A bonus selection of horror mayhem on the last Saturday of October, back in the West End. The spiritual home for the UK premiere of Zombie Resurrection.

And they want screeners today. No rest for the peddlers of the wicked – the poor FrightFest guys get to move seamlessly from watching films in a cinema all weekend to watching more films from the comfort of their respective sofas.

Zombie Resurrection has moved on substantially from the earlier screeners last month. Glen-the-sound has a bucket-load of ADR to play with, Dale-the-tunes has had another spin with his music, Ads-and-Matt-the-VFX have been sending through plenty of updated splatter, Tom-the-foley has been tirelessly generating nastier zombie noises, and Marcelo-the-edit has fixed some of the more persistent confusions from the test screenings. We can do so much better now.

And FrightFest deserve a better screener. Send us your latest, gents, and let’s see where we are.

So, after another mental couple of days, the DVD that got delivered to them yesterday is that much happier. All of the ADR is in, all the cracks in the music resulting from the final edit have been pasted over, and we are now officially without a green sock to be seen.

Happier, but not quite there yet. There is still some way to go before we can unleash it on the paying public: another 22 CGI shots, 23 more that need attention, and 117 tweaks to the sound. So, it’s another busy seven days on full alert as we snipe off these last moments, and only then do we get to find out whether we needed to rush after all.

But in any case, September is when we plan on gathering the cast, crew and horde together for the first mass screening, at an awkward time of day on an as yet undetermined cinema screen that will be mildly inconvenient for most people to get to.

And sadly, this will also be the moment when rash pub promises come back to blight us on the arms – it’s almost time to start looking for a tattooist in the Winchester environs to dispense a couple of Charmed logos. Any recommendations? Stuck.

Mac-spletives

And so, 34 bread-based lunches later with Dale-the-music, Glen-the-sound and the eight Zombie Resurrection cast members with sound to fix, yesterday we finally say adieu to our ADR.

The final tally – 225 new sound snippets to improve our aural landscape. The odd line of dialogue with too much noise on it, grunts and groans from various bludgeonings, swathes of zombie growls, screaming, weeping and manic laughing. And three bonus lines of dialogue to assist the more confused viewer through the final act.

Hampshire has already said another fond farewell to the delicious acting prowess of Rachel, Joe, Simon, Shami, Eric, Danny and Jade, and it was the incomparable Jim Sweeney that was the last through Dale-the-music’s Southampton studio, flying down from Glasgow yesterday just to swear into a microphone.

One of our deliverables for international sales is a re-written screenplay, with the original dialogue swapped out with the actual lines spoken in the movie. It's an essential document for subtitling and dubbing the film for foreign markets. When I got onto this couple of weeks back, I had naively assumed that this would be a fairly simple exercise – after all, Jake and I went to a lot of trouble finessing the dialogue before the shoot to make the lines trip easily and effectively out of the mouths of the actors. Surely a professional respect for the written word would ensure only minor deviations from the page?

This, it seems, is not how it works. Seven hours later and I had effectively re-transcribed the entire movie from scratch. And it was a hell of a lot better than the one we wrote.

But along the way I did get some interesting insights into the acting process.

Regular attendees to the blog will know that Jim plays a character called Mac in the film – a veteran soldier with a voracious appetite for a very specific brand of zombie carnage. And an uncanny ability to cut directly to the insult. My recent exertions transcribing the film into Final Draft allowed access to some enlightening statistics: Mac has 888 words of dialogue, and the highest swearing-to-rest-of-sentence ratio of any character. And this was just the swearing that Final Draft’s profanity filter could identify – the vaginas, head-raped cock-parks and cock-in-anuses have all unwittingly passed through the algorithm with an official safe-for-PG-viewing stamp.

And so it came as quite a surprise to me to find that Jim had somehow secreted another twenty 'fucks' into the film above and beyond those allotted in the screenplay. Mac now defaults to dropping in expletives where a lesser man would use a comma, and probably means that any future trailer cut for universal viewing won’t feature the big man with his mouth open at any point.

Although, to be fair, Jake and I didn’t go out of our way to help. After getting Jim to roar repeatedly at an empty Southampton graveyard to 'shut the fuck up' (Charmed Apocalypse’s new preferred quiet outdoors spot – see the earlier blog entry for the problems we had with Rachel and Joe), our final act in the studio before dropping him back at the airport was to record some personalised Mac-based ringtones for our high-rolling IndieGoGo contributors. It was one of the perks we offered, courtesy of Zombie Resurrection’s 'swearing connoisseur'.

Some advanced warning to Marty, Debbie, Adam, Andy and Chris – better not assign these to anybody in your phone book that might call you when you’re in a public place. One for when the mother-in-law rings, I recommend. Incarcerated.

Back in the loop

And suddenly it’s all go again in Charmed Central.

After those long painful weeks of hearing about all the hard work required to finish the movie only through despatches back from the post-production guys, Jake and I have found ourselves firmly in the mix again. Gone are the thoughts of 'is this the right moment to start looking for a proper job before I default on my mortgage'. Making a movie has once again become a full-time enterprise. Full-time, but with the odd eighteen-hour marathon thrown in for good measure.

It seems that we are officially into the movie-making end-game.

The September festival screenings have probably done as much to galvanise everybody into making this last push as anything else, not that we’ve heard anything back yet from the big three that we put in for last month. But if Texas, Toronto or Sitges do come calling, we need to be ready to answer.

So, we set a date for delivery of all the finished pieces – 7^th September. All the VFX shots, grading, sound, music and titles.

And throughout the diverse Zombie Resurrection post-production crew members, minds focus. Here is a digest of the activities of the last week or so: 

Tuesday – our second test screening of the movie to complete strangers in Winchester (with a massive thank you to Christian, Jeff, Adam, Ashley, Joe, Naomi and Becca for laughing in mostly the right places). 

Wednesday – a meeting with our VFX guys to discuss the CGI shots that we had already received, and to agree a schedule for the delivery of all the rest of them.

Thursday – an audio scrutiny of the film to finalise all the remaining ADR samples that we need to collect from the other six cast members, followed by a thorough analysis of the feedback forms from the two screenings to look for common threads (and a minor dialogue re-write in the final act to deal with the confusion that some people were experiencing).

Friday – more VFX shots.

Saturday – Simon and Shami join the posse at Dale-the music’s studio in Southampton to do all their ADR.

Sunday – Eric and Danny do likewise.

Monday – St. Marcelo-the-edit comes to Winchester to undertake the final finessing of the film down to our absolutely, totally finished cut, honest.

Tuesday – more VFX shots, with another meeting with the guys in the evening.

And today – our penultimate ADR session, with Jade.

And on the seventh day He rested. We, however, should be so lucky.

But what the hell would I do with a day off? It’s not work unless you would rather be doing something else. It’s a taste that’s going to make my delayed search for a day-job that much suckier, but then again my CV must have flight-risk written all over it anyway. Destitute.

Credit crunched

I’ve no idea what’s changed, but it seems that we’re now official.

Presumably some threshold must have been crossed in the arcane IMDb processes, but sometime last night our Zombie Resurrection entry into the Internet Movie Database suddenly appeared. Twice, actually. No warning, no information, nothing. One day we were considered to be a high completion risk, and the next we’re all buddies again.

It might have had something to do with the recent round of festival submissions - the screener submission website WithoutABox is part of the same organisation that’s responsible for IMDb. Although the database rules state that you must have a verifiable premiere date before you can go up, it looks like the $55 entrance fee was enough to buy us a bit of latitude (unless the festival have good news that they’ve failed to share with us).

And so there we are. A complete list of all our cast, crew and zombies, for all to enjoy.

It has taken a good couple of weeks to tidy the entry up into something that almost looks sensible, with every change request taking a reported 7-10 days to be processed. There are still spelling mistakes on a couple of horde members’ names in the pipeline, and a few job titles that needed fixing, but it’s close enough.

But something that we can’t seem to fix is the awful synopsis, and a really strange tagline that must have been written on the spot by the festival organiser. In the place where the pithy 'prey for salvation' should be sits the slightly less manageable 'a zombie messiah that can raise the undead from the dead...after they've died...again'.

So we continue to plug away, to trim and manicure. And hopefully by the time that anyone can actually go and buy the movie it’ll be coiffured to perfection. Although, if anybody knows the IMDb administration password, we could cut out a lot of faffing.

Go take a gander, and we’ll see you again in 7-10 days. Immaculate.

Into the great beyond…

Sobering times in Charmed Central.

So, let’s just take a moment to consider where we currently are with Zombie Resurrection. The first pass of the music is written, the sound is tidy, and everything has been coloured in. The current best copy of the film still has a long way to go before it’s finished, but it does finally look and behave like a film should. Prospective horror festivals will accept nothing less.

Zombie Resurrection is open for judgement.

With our eyes on an early September finishing line (to hit the first of the possible festival screenings), this is now the last moment we have to make it better. Over the 150 times that Jake and I have watched the latest cut over the past few weeks, a couple of moments have jumped out at us that need work. Tweaks. Nothing drastic. A finessed edit here and an extended beat there.

But, really, what do we know? 150 viewings later and the jokes aren’t funny anymore. The jumps don’t shock, the gore doesn’t offend, and the emotional moments don’t move. For us the film exists as a series of moments: shots needing light balancing, dialogue needing replacement, bludgeonings needing a coating with digital gore.

Gone is the big picture. Gone is any concept of whether the film actually hangs together as an entity.

And now is the last moment that we have to sort that out.

So, now is also the perfect moment to get a bunch of people together who have no previous attachment to the film, and ask them. The great British zombie-loving public. These are the only people we can trust to let us know where the problems are.

Time to organise a couple of screenings. Get in a load of beer and pizza, sit a panel of people that we’ve never met before down in front of the largest telly we can find, and watch them watching it. Our first completely dispassionate audiences.

And it’s as daunting a prospect as we’ve had to face since the shoot wrapped. Well, more specifically, since I had to deal with the unwelcome stains on my girlfriend’s floor after the wrap party.

The first session was last night, hosted by hero-zombie-Ross in his Winchester cathedral of technology. Having taken a slug to the head over the course of the shoot, he isn’t allowed to have an opinion, but his pals are. Grab a beer, sit down, and get comfortable, Simon, Louise, Row, Daren and Ormy.

Please don’t underestimate what a painful evening this was for Jake and me. Sat to one side, the film suddenly seemed to race by without ever catching its breath. Wasn’t that last moment meant to be funnier? Did anybody actually find that last jump scary? Can anybody understand Mac’s Glaswegian accent?

And the biggest laugh of the night? An overly-graphic sound effect that Tom had added to his foley reel to accompany the premature ending of some woodland coitus. It’s an immediate answer to the question that Jake and I had been wrestling with beforehand – is that squelch just a little bit too much? No, it turns out.

A braver man than me would have looked at the completed questionnaires by now, but I may save that moment for a stiff scotch later in the week. We have another screening in Winchester University on Tuesday, bizarrely back in the same room within which we shot all our Chapel footage last year. It’ll be interesting to see whether they’ve managed to get all the blood out of the floor tiles.

So, until then, I’ll content myself with the nagging butterflies, and save the analysis until all the votes are in. But in any case it’s a big Charmed thank you to Ross, Simon, Louise, Row, Daren and Ormy for giving over their Friday night to make two grown men nervous. Suddenly I understand where all the worry-lines on Andy Murray’s mum’s face have come from. Tweaking.

Building sound-castles

Bloody kids.

Yesterday marked the beginning of the ADR process – gathering all the replacement bits of bad-quality dialogue and miscellaneous bonus grunts and groans from the cast.

Automated Dialogue Replacement, although I’d be interested to know how the word 'Automated' found its way into the acronym as it was a far from straightforward exercise. But Sunday was decided to be the moment to take a day off from watching people running around on the telly to kick-start the process of making Glen-the-sound’s life easier.

Step forward Rachel Nottingham and Joe Rainbow, Zombie Resurrection’s naïve teenager Becca and officious party leader Gibson respectively. Good solid professionals to call upon to play the part of cast guinea pigs. Nothing too strenuous missing from their collection of on-set dialogue - just some extra sounds of weeping, exertions grunts associated with various zombie bludgeonings, and long swathes of the deranged kind of Tourette’s that arises during the slow transition to zombiedom.

And a couple of lines from the first act of the film, where the extraneous noises evident in pre-apocalyptic Portsmouth woodland simply couldn’t be scrubbed out.

There is, it seems, an adage in getting good quality ADR – if you’re replacing lines originally spoken outside, you need to get the sound recordings done outside too. Unless you’re doing all your ADR in a perfect anechoic environment, there will always be a little room reverb evident in what you record in a recording studio. It’s OK for all the inside stuff, as you’ll then be adding a whole load more fake reverb to the ADR tracks to make them match the rest of the dialogue from the shoot. But once even a little bit is on there it can’t be taken off.

In the great room-less outdoors, these lines will stand out like a green sock on a bloodied stump.

And so we face problem number one: is there anywhere in Hampshire that is suitably quiet? Somewhere acceptably close to a car park, but away from planes, trains, automobiles, dog-walkers, fields of livestock, chirruping crickets or tweeting birds?

Or, more importantly, bloody kids?

There is something about the eager squeals of children that carries for miles. Too much car noise? Just head deeper into the woods. Aeroplanes? Hang back for 20 seconds and it’ll be gone. But the sound of an eight-year-old having fun anywhere in the same postcode? You’re waiting for nap-time before that’ll get any better. And while I can’t blame any parents for wanting to take full advantage of the few days of actual summer that we’re going to get this year, please know that your selfish pursuit of fresh air and exercise is making our lives really tricky.

But, a hundred takes of all the swapped-out dialogue later, and Glen-the-sound was finally happy that he’ll be able to fabricate quiet versions of all our troubled chat, even if it’s a syllable-by-syllable Frankenstein agglomeration of acceptably noise-less moments.

And so we get to head indoors, over to the recording studio built at the back of Dale-the-tunes’ garden.

This is where all the movie music magic happens. A grown-up potting shed into which Dale can escape from the wife and kids, and actually do something worthwhile other than sipping scotch and pretending to whittle away at a piece of wood while listening to the Archers. Sound-proofed, covered in acoustic diffusers, and with a bloody-great piano in the middle where the lawn-mower should be.

And it was at this point that everything took a turn for the smooth. As Rachel screamed and Joe sweated, we powered through the rest of the list with grace and agility. Outside in the garden no one was any the wiser about the cacophony of shrieks and growls that have left me with slight tinnitus this morning. Anybody needing to gut a pig or torture a suspect in a residential setting could do a lot worse than phoning Dale-the-tunes up for copies of his architectural plans.

And at eight o’clock last night we stepped outside into a welcome cool breeze with 2/9s of our ADR firmly in the bag. To Glen-the-sound and Dale-the-tunes, it’s an enormous Charmed thank you for giving over your Sunday to our screamy silliness. To Rachel and Joe, it’s our eternal appreciation for coming back to Winchester almost a year to the day after we started shooting to re-enjoy the horrors of life on a zombie set. To all the other cast members, prepare yourself for a phone call.

And to the parents of small children in the environs, what’s wrong with the X-box or the cinema? If it’s fresh air and countryside you’re after, open a bloody window and buy a pot-plant. Incredulous.

Zomtography

With only a week to go, now seems like the perfect time to let you know what you’ll be missing if you’re thinking of wasting the next two weeks sat in front of the Olympics.

Down on the South Coast we’ve got better things planned for the first half of August. The terrifically talented Rob Luckins, he of photographic duties on the set of the movie last year, is having an exhibition. And there’s not a discus, high-jump or sand-pit in sight.

Unlike some of the key roles on the Zombie Resurrection crew (I’m thinking of Director and DoP here, particularly), taking photos is what Rob does for a living. Well. When he’s not pointing a camera at somebody, he’s teaching other people how to, and so it may come as no surprise that he’s amassed quite a lot of them by now.

Enough, it seems, to decorate Room 237, Portsmouth’s premiere comic-book store, with some of his choicest cuts.

Disappointingly, it won’t be wall-to-wall zombie carnage, although by popular demand last summer’s undead will be making a solid appearance. This is the problem when you spend the rest of your time taking photos of Mike Leigh and Wayne Hemingway – they tend to get grumpy when they’re bumped by a bunch of nutters covered in blood. One sympathises.

Anyway, for those zombie-enthusiasts in the environs, it’s a no-brainer. For everyone else, it’s a road trip. Catch it while it’s still squelchy. Shot.

Beaten into submission

Jesus H Ripe – that was harder work than I had imagined.

To save you any angst and stress, I should reassure you all up front that the screener did get finished, and was submitted in time (just) to Fantastic Fest, in Austin, Texas. The US’ largest horror film festival would be an awesome place for a world premiere.

Well, I say 'in time'. Actually, by the time that the film had finally successfully uploaded to the extraordinarily flaky WithoutABox site on about the eighth time of asking, it was about 36 hours past the deadline, but a severe amount of apologising and mea cuplae to the organisers later and we are officially locked and loaded.

But this was no easy ride. I haven’t had so little sleep over such a long period of time since the shoot.

The division of labour broke down something like this: Matt-the-VFX was pulling together the last of the VFX shots through till Thursday lunchtime, and then FTPing the buggers across to us. Meanwhile Ads-the-grade was making the whole movie look pretty and FTPing his bits across in stages. Glen-the-sound was tidying up the last bits of problematic dialogue, and Tom-the-foley was manufacturing some deliciously sick zombie noises. Andy-the-dog’s-body was downloading everything as it came in and putting the jigsaw together, while Jake-the-actually-knows-what-he’s-doing was grading the bits of the movie that Ads didn’t have time to get on to, adding muzzle flashes where appropriate, and plastering over as many cracks as we could. 

An insane amount of juggling. But by the time that I left Jake’s hive at 5 AM on Friday morning, we had all the right notes in mostly the right places.

Friday’s activities were to be so much simpler – one final quality check viewing, render the bugger off and fill in all the submission forms. And we had until midnight before the deadline ran out. Masses of time.

And relax…

Ah no. Not in Charmed-land. Nothing ever goes that smoothly. The forms were simple enough, but getting them a copy of the movie in the format they wanted was an exercise guaranteed to confound even the most patient of filmmakers. It was the initial promise of 36 hour render times, and a website that just wasn’t interested in accepting our film, no matter what browser, broadband provider or OS we tried.

But by 4 AM on Sunday morning it was there, courtesy of Jake’s girlfriend’s parent’s broadband, and via an enormous amount of industrial language.

And it’s my sincerest apologies to Nik-the-zombie-extra, whose fortieth birthday party on Saturday night was the final casualty of the enterprise. Sorry, mate – I’ll make sure I’m at your fiftieth, if you’re still talking to me.

So, it’s a couple of days to catch our breath, and then we get to go round the loop again with a couple more festivals. Let’s hope that karma takes stock of the credit that we’ve amassed over the past few days when determining how easy a ride that’ll be. But, when all’s said and done, I’ve got to tell you that the movie really does look and sound lovely. Sure, there’s still the odd green sock, and we have gallons of digital gore yet to throw about the place, but it doesn’t require a leap of imagination to see the finished film that’s hiding in the mist.

Hell – it’s not like we haven’t made it easy for them. Invisible.

Now you see it...

Now you don't...

The thin brown line

It’s all going down to the wire in Charmed Central.

It’s the end of the long wait, as Jake and I try to assemble all the first passes on everything that’s happening in Zombie Resurrection post-production into one place. It’s not going to look perfect. There’ll be CGI missing, green socks aplenty, and all our zombies will sound nothing like they’re going to in the finished film. But it’ll be enough. Enough, hopefully, to secure ourselves a spot in a couple of festivals.

All the best festival submissions happen in June and July. The global horror silly season appears to run from September to Halloween every year, and if you miss the boat there is a strong possibility that the US premiere of your movie is going to be in front of twenty people at an obscure festival organised in a church hall in Boise, Idaho. And there’s no way anybody’s going to let us out of a church alive after seeing the film.

So, it’s got to look nice. Not perfect, but nice enough that the programmers can see beyond the next few months of manic post-production activity at the finished movie lurking beneath the surface.

And, I guess more importantly, it’s got to be now.

Deadline one is at the end of this week. This is for the largest and most prestigious horror film festival in the US. Which probably then makes it the largest in the whole world. Within the extraordinarily vain world within which Jake and I operate, this would be a satisfactory place for the world premiere of Zombie Resurrection, and getting accepted can’t hurt when chatting to distributors and sales agents.

And being the conscientious programme managers that we are, we gave ourselves a week to allow us to bolt it all together. Everybody – can we have your homework in for Friday 6^th, please?

A week seems reasonable. There are going to be important pieces missing, and the inevitable mistakes. A week gives people time to fix any major problems, to dig out important elements that absolutely need to be in there, and for us to fill in the remaining gaps as best we can. And then enough time for us to upload an entire movie to the submission site over my woeful broadband.

So, you’d imagine that we’d be just about done piecing everything together by now. Er… not quite.

Stand up Dale-the-tunes. Charmed Apocalypse’s star performer. By Wednesday last week we not only had his first pass on the music for the entire film in all its 24-bit mastered finery, but we’d also had the opportunity to sit and watch the film with him, chat over a bunch of changes, and he’s already managed to address every single one in time.

The man is currently sat on a cruise-liner somewhere giving his brain a well-earned rest. Just as well he works so damn fast, as it wouldn’t be much of a holiday if he’d had to shlep his keyboard and computer with him, and then spend his shore leave sat in a Marrakech internet cafe.

And the sound is also looking pretty good. About ¾ of the dialogue has been tidied up, and we have plenty of the juicier foley elements – the rips, hits and splats. It’s incomplete, and filled with what I can best describe as temporary zombie noises. But what we have got in is fabulous quality. When it’s finished the film will sound genuinely splendid.

Bang in a couple of workarounds, appropriate some bonus foley from the internet, revisit a couple of moments from the native audio footage, and we’re in business. So far, so good.

But the graded footage and the CGI. This is causing us sleepless nights.

As of midday on Tuesday, we have nine minutes of graded footage in our timeline. We are roughly seventy minutes shy of a sensible viewing experience. And we are only about twenty shots into our CGI list of 88.

This is the problem at our end of the movie machine. The guys that are pulling all our visuals together are all proper VFX artists. They have day-jobs in the industry, and even though the CGI is the single largest cost in the Zombie Resurrection post-production budget the whole thing still only equates to about 2/3 of what they would charge James Cameron for a single shot. This wealth of craft and expertise shows itself in the superb quality of the work that they are producing; however, when JC needs something done quickly we find out just where the pecking order starts and stops. Money talks, bullshit walks.

Great for the finished film. An extraordinary stressor when we’re also working to a tight deadline.

And from where I am right now, it’s touch and go whether we’ll actually have something to upload in time. It’ll be a few days longer of leaping out of bed in the middle of the night to start something downloading that will then take fourteen hours to complete. It might just be doable if everything works first time, but this is not the best of project management principles.

So we wait, crossed fingers poised over the download icon. Anybody know a good steak-house in Boise, or can recommend the best US health insurance for trauma and burns injuries? Excommunicated.

Screamers

Across the country, a team of post-production elves are busy stitching shoes together from the threadbare rags that Jake and I have provided them.

The sensible movie-related activities have all flown the Charmed coop, and are now growing up with different parents until August. Every so often a new piece of music or some tidied dialogue appears in our in-box, like a postcard home to tell us that they’re all having a great time and not to worry.

But it’s just that it all feels so, well… out of our hands.

These guys really know what they’re doing, and it is wildly inappropriate to be micro-managing them. Jake and I spent some time a while back detailing exactly what we were after from the sound, music, titles and digital splatter, and now we’ve just got to let them get on with it. After a year and a bit of being intimately involved in the minutiae of the film, this bit of the process simply doesn’t need us anymore.

And with all this work going on, it just doesn’t feel right to be sat around twiddling my thumbs.

Distributors don’t want to hear from us again until the film is finished, and we shouldn’t be going back to Sales Agents until we’ve secured the UK distribution. Surely there must be something to do before August?

Ah, yes – horror film festivals. Time to plan our strategy for getting the movie out there.

For me at least, getting the film up on a big screen and in front of the genre faithful is the pay-off for the last eighteen months of hard work. In the most stressful moments on set during the shoot, it was the thought of being sat at the back of a cinema watching other people reacting to our movie that kept me going.

It’s like planning an enormous wedding. Time to organise the church, I think.

Horror film festivals are universally awesome places to hang out. It’s a widely accepted adage that horror fans are the nicest audiences out there. Most enthusiasts have a personal temperament completely at odds with the gore and carnage that they sit themselves through for entertainment. At FrightFest each year, after the last movie has screened, everybody with any energy left decamps to the same bar till the early hours – audience members, organisers, directors and stars. And it is a fabulously relaxed and collegiate atmosphere. This was the first time that I met Johannes Roberts. I’ve shared a cigarette with Adam Green, talked sex scenes with Tony 'Candyman' Todd and bullied movie recommendations out of Kim Newman.

And it’s a great audience. Every genre fan there has sat through hours of really, really bad movies as part of their horror education, and now they’re having to actually pay to watch the buggers they’re determined to enjoy themselves.

Every gory death gets a round of applause. No one checks their phone or walks out halfway through. And anybody with enough nerve has the opportunity to go and chat up Emily Booth.

So, this week Jake and I have been compiling a list of all the very coolest horror film festivals across the globe, from Texas to Lapland. When they run, and what’s the last date for submissions.

And, given that we’ll be all done with the movie in August, three particular festivals have emerged as contenders. But I’m obviously not going to tell you where they are in case they turn us down and we look like a couple of mugs. Just to say that the FrightFest biggie isn’t amongst them, as we’ve missed the submission deadline by some margin. But, if everything goes exactly to plan, October will see us tattooed, tanned and sat on a train to Glasgow with a stomach full of T-bone and polenta.

And in the process we get to manufacture a completely new deadline for our post-production posse, principally as a way of artificially involving Jake and me a little bit more in what’s going on. The festival screener deadline.

The screener is not necessarily the cut of the film that will play at the festival - it’s simply about securing a ticket for the big party. It doesn’t need to be technically perfect, but it does need to give someone on the organising committee a sufficiently warm glow that they’ll take it on faith that you’ll not be embarrassing them later in the year. Some remaining green socks are OK. Missing ADR should be fine. The light and chroma balancing of the technical grade doesn’t need to be perfect. Sometime between the screener going off and the final film being projected, we’ve got to tweak the edit, get in some people that know nothing about the film to watch it and tell us where it doesn’t work, tighten the score and colour it all in properly.

And the whole thing is contingent on us getting a sensible version of the movie together by the beginning of July. Three weeks back cracking the whip. Damn, does that feel good. Overbearing.

Last Tango in Cannes

Wow. Where to start?

So, that was Cannes, in all its carefully-marshalled insanity. Five days of meetings, trains, hasty sandwiches and biblically bad weather. A plastering of Rutger Hauer and Christian Slater movie posters, where every trip along the Croisette could be delayed by a crowd gathering around Alec Baldwin, Coldplay or just a man that wears live cats on his head. It was 24/7 game-face from the Charmed massive, an umbrella, DVD and business card always to hand.

And I loved every minute of it.

I really did – I genuinely loved it. I can’t think of five more enjoyable days over the course of the whole Zombie Resurrection production. It’s like an interactive movie Glastonbury, but one where you get to hang out backstage and help pick the bands.

OK – let’s get the housekeeping out of the way first. Mission number one was to sort out our UK distribution and get sales agent representation for the movie, with a bunch of meetings that Jake and I arranged ahead of time. And while no one was going to commit to buying the movie based only on a six-minute DVD, it’s safe to say that we now have a clear contender for both roles. When the finished screener is ready, we know exactly who to send them to. Mission accomplished.

Well, when I say that no one was going to commit to buying the movie based on the six-minute cut, that isn’t strictly true. We received an offer for the German distribution rights, based on a scan of the poster and around 45 seconds of the trailer that they watched on my phone.

Seriously. And it wasn’t even a bad offer.

It seems that this isn’t that uncommon. We heard of at least two zombie movies that were picked up for frankly ridiculous amounts of cash based on the poster and title alone. It seems we may have spent too much time trying to make a watchable film when a weekend course in Photoshop would have been enough.

So, we turned it down. There is nothing quite like passing up the promise of cold hard cash to make you feel like a player.

Which moves us onto mission number two – festivals.

This was quite a strange one actually, as through luck rather than judgement we ended up meeting a bucket-load of people intimately plugged into the horror festival world: FrightFest, Fantastic, Fantasia, Lund, Leeds. And nobody went home empty handed. It was an eight-sided pincer assault on the festival world with the movie that they’re going to be referring to as 'that one with the zombie Jesus'.

I love horror people. It’s a side of the industry that seems to be run exclusively by fans. No egos, no bullshit, and a sincere respect for the enormous number of genre enthusiasts there are out there. And we saw plenty of people that fall into the other camp. Fittingly, the French have an expression for it: 'péter plus haut que son cul' - literally 'to fart higher than ones arsehole'. Unsurprisingly, Cannes is a magnet for high-farters.

I digress.

And this is even before I start on the Champions’ League Final, or getting the seal of approval for our poster art and copy from the artist whose zombie DVD covers we originally set out to emulate (and how bizarre is it that we ended up sat around the same table with this guy anyway?) It was my very first and wholly ironic Royal with Cheese, punctuated with the inevitable internal GPS fails that saw us wandering around Nice completely lost at 5 AM, or walking up an emergency pavement on the side of a motorway the day afterwards. There were the early screenings of Cockneys vs. Zombies and Storage 24, and I could go on. I’ll pop some photos up in the next few days, or better still take Jake and me out for a couple of beers and we’ll tell you all about it.

So, it’s a much more formal thank-you to the lovely Amanda-in-Nice for putting us up (and up with us) for the duration. She was such an unfailingly good host that she even managed to procure a yacht-mattress for the occasion formerly slept on by Marlon Brando. I should stress that this was from anecdotal information and not because there was a Marlon-shaped dent visible in the over-stressed springs.

Just the kind of night’s sleep you need before someone makes you an offer you can’t refuse. Tangoed.

Achtung Riviera

Well that came around quickly.

Yup, this time tomorrow, Jake and I will be basking in the Mediterranean summer heat at the Cannes Film Festival, swimming with the sharks and doing our very best to stay away from the sharp bits. It’s our first foray into the world of the hard sell to distributors and sales agents, and I can’t wait to test our wares against the great and the good at the money end of the industry.

Tomorrow we get to see why they call it show-business.

Cannes is basically two separate film events happening one on top of the other: the glamorous red-carpeted one filled with the beautiful people and baying paparazzi that you see on the TV, and its idiot cousin (the Marché du Film) which happens in the bowels of the same building. It's an enormous warehouse of stressed filmmakers, distributors and sales agents, all hawking their B-movie fare around trying to secure that elusive Taiwanese DVD release.

Guess which one we’re going to be at.

Trust me, we’re going in armed. A gorgeous looking and sounding 6-minute précis of the movie, wrapped in a suitably sacrilegious sleeve, and with a skipful of A5 flyers. Come on, distributors of the world. Who wants some?

Even though we’ll be dropped into the festival as a couple of neophytes, we have dug out so much information about what goes on that I almost know what to expect. We have sat through Chris Jones’ on-line seminar for Cannes virgins, devoured the How to Sell your Film Without Selling your Soul e-book, and received advice from just about every filmmaker that we’ve met along the journey.

Safe to say that there doesn’t appear to be one best way of approaching Cannes and of finding distribution. People only know what did and didn’t work with them. That said, certain universal truths have emerged: don’t buy a drink in a hotel bar (€100 for three cocktails), don’t buy a drink in a nightclub (€70 for two 33 cl stubbies), and if you find a party that’s offering free drinks don’t leave before you’ve had enough to drink.

And, who better to give us our final steer onto the inside track than the legendary Johannes Roberts, writer / director of the Zombie Resurrection template F. He very kindly took time away from distribution activities of his own on his latest feature Storage 24 to hook up with Jake and me in a London coffee-shop. To even up the numbers, Johannes brought along his flatmate James Harris, producer of Psychosis, Screwed and the soon-to-be-released Cockneys vs. Zombies, and even before the Frappuccino had had time to settle the two of them had launched into a torrent of distribution advice that made my hand hurt.

Johannes and James have been around this loop so many times before that they know practically all the short cuts. To go into details would I’m sure jeopardise their respective futures in the industry, so let’s just say we are now in possession of some very promising marketing strategies. It has to count amongst one of the most productive coffee breaks that I have ever experienced, where just one piece of good advice might translate to literally thousands of pounds in sales revenue. Thanks again, guys – you left us with spinning heads and all the better prepared for it.

And in our last act as Cannes virgins, Monday night was spent in the esteemed company of some of the Zombie Resurrection stars, in what we’re now happy to refer to as the best boozer in London. Inevitably any festival conversation was soon side-lined by discussions on the merits of yellow trousers (firmly pro), the best kinds of adverts to be in, and cataloguing all the places that one of our prop guns had been before Shami seized an on-set photo-opportunity to gave it a big lick.

  

The last fifteen months have been one extraordinary journey, but tomorrow we finally get to approach the inner-most cave. I’ll try and post some updates from the front, but let’s see just how much time we have. We go out as boys, we return as warriors. Bravehearted.

Making the grade

On a gloriously sunny spring morning in early March, Captain Jamie-the-marine must have thought that Jake and I were being a couple of prima donnas for insisting that he wore a plastic night-vision headset.

To be fair to him, I did sympathise. You couldn’t see a thing through the prop goggles. It was hard enough to negotiate the way around my flat with them on, and we were making him run blind through dense woodland with only the promise that we’d yell 'stop' if it looked like he was about to career into a tree. It’s a level of production respect that’ll be responsible for a thoroughly boring out-takes reel on the DVD.

But all the scariest horror movies happen at night. Sadly, even the happiest cast and crew get grumpy if you stand them outdoors at 4 AM in March while you faff about trying to swap out the blown fuse on a generator just because you haven’t got enough light. So this is where the movie magic comes in. Shoot it all during the day and then turn the brightness down later.

Sod it - we’ll fix it in post. The rallying cry of failed filmmakers the world over. We can just paper over all our ineptitude and incompetence when we’re grading the movie.

Grading is a massively complicated and laborious exercise. First you have to adjust every shot to match up the light levels, and balance out any differences in colour, hue and chroma. You're basically dealing with all the footage as it comes directly from the various cameras. And only then can you start to make the movie look like how you actually want it to look.

So when I say turn down the brightness, it turns out that it’s slightly more complicated than that. This is why Ads-the-grade is on speed-dial.

'The thing you’ve got to realise about Ads', his business partner Matt-the-VFX assured us at the time of the first trailer, 'is that he’s a bloody genius'. It’s complicated, but it’s well within his talent set.

Repeat blog attendees may recognise Ads-the-grade as Ads-the-VFX. The man has been extraordinarily busy of late. And today he sent through some screenshots from the graded Cannes trailer for Jake and me to check over.

So this is what the film’s actually going to look like.

And in amongst the screen-grabs were some of Captain Jamie-the-marine. But at night.

Jake and I have always wanted to go for a really bleached out and desaturated look for the film. It’s all to do with the rods and cones in your eyeballs. When it’s dark, a more sensitive set of photoreceptors take over, only they don’t do colour very well. And, bloody genius that he is, Ads-the-grade has made it so.

Before…

…and by moonlight…

This month has been conspiring to surprise and delight me at every turn, with the astonishing quality of stuff that's coming in from our post-production posse. It seems that the less that Jake and I are involved in the minutiae of making the film, the better it gets. Contrary to popular belief, these guys could polish a turd. I just can’t wait to see my face in it. Reflective.

Batmanned

With the considerable firepower of Ads and Matt-the-VFX, Dale-the-tunes, Glen-the-sound and Tom-the foley all laser-targeted onto the extended Cannes trailer, in a distant part of London at least some work on the actual movie continues unabated.

Not that the work that the others are doing won’t make it into the final movie. It’s all about prioritising their activities. All the right notes, but in the wrong order.

But in the darkest recesses of Brockley, London SE4, Rup-the-titles is currently sat surrounded by unpacked boxes calmly plugging away at our opening title sequence, unaware that elsewhere on the zombie rollercoaster people are manically throwing digital blood about the place and learning French.

I’ve known Rup-the-titles since I was a kid, when he and his brothers were known to all in the area as the under-age drinkers. Thankfully, things have moved on. He got older.

In some ways, Rup has wound up with the hardest story-telling challenge of the whole movie. We open the film on day zero of the apocalypse to show the Kate-the-scream falling foul of Captain Jamie-the-marine. And then we re-join the action 15 months later. As you can imagine, quite a lot has happened in this time.

And there ain’t nowhere else to show it except in the titles.

So, in 1:45 seconds, Rup has been tasked with the responsibility of showing a load more soldiers going zombie, a bunch of people getting bitten, the total collapse of civilisation as we know it, the scary zombies slowly rotting away to shambling bags of pest, the start of the fight-back, and the establishment of the enclaves within which the survivors all congregate.

Oh, and he should really try and get the names of the cast and heads of departments in there too.

And the chosen medium? The animatic. A living comic with bits of animation, camera pans and zooms. Not our idea, but his, and judging by the early test footage that he has sent through it’s a stroke of genius. This is going to be a lot of fun on the big screen.

But it was only when Rup mentioned that he had hooked up with a comic book illustrator for some of the more detailed punch-ins that cogs started turning in Charmed Central.

Being the flighty London socialite that he is, Rup doesn’t just know any old flavour of illustrator. Enter the formidable Mike Dowling, with titles such as 2000AD and Batman in his artwork canon.

Damn!

But wait a minute. We’ve got a moment in the title sequence when we see humanity reassert itself against the rotting zombie plague. A ragtag band of wannabe soldiers running and gunning through the badlands. Isn’t this basically the same backstory we had written for Mac, Zombie Resurrection’s unhinged bane of all things undead?

You know, wouldn’t it be quite cool to see Mac getting his gun off in the title sequence?

Yes. Yes it would. Can Mike make it so?

And so once again we shamelessly drag the newly muppeted Jim Sweeney back down to our level. Any attempts to try and escape the clutches of the zombie horde by working with Ken Loach will ultimately prove futile.

There are very few things out there that go beyond cool - becoming a cuddly toy is just about the only thing that comes to mind. But into this tiny list we now need to include getting your face drawn by the guy that gets paid to sketch Bruce Wayne. We always knew that Mac was going to be most people’s favourite character in the film, but I had no idea that Jim was going to be bogarting all the after-dinner treats like this. Immortalised.