Zombies and Mormons - Dorm of the Dead

I was sitting in Sanford dining hall studying up on some Mormon theology and enjoying a bit of sustenance (for reference, this day be Wednesday, 3/11/09) when Adam Wells appeared out of nowhere and sat down across from me. Now who’s this “Adam Wells,” you ask? A’ight. Well, this crazy cat is another Campus Crusade for Christ’er like myself who just happened to live two doors down from me Sophomore year. Solid character. Didn’t really get to know him too well that year, but nonetheless, he was a cool guy with a heckuva pop culture knowledge. He was a CA in Sanford this year, so it wasn’t too surprising that I’d run into him in the place of eating of that place. Honestly, though, I wasn’t too happy about the fact that he decided to eat with me at the time. As I mentioned, I was reading some Mormon doctrine and the like because I had a meeting scheduled with a couple of Mormons for about an hour after this meal. I’d run into Elders Sorenson and Spencer a couple of days prior while making my way down to late night. We three talked for about 15 minutes before they had to go their own way and I mine. Due to our religious intriguements (yeah, that's probably not a word) , we’d scheduled a meeting for a couple days later (this día in question) in order to further converse about Mormonism, Christianity, and the like.

Anyways, Adam and I were chilling when he brought up the fact that he was filming a zombie movie for a class of his/his senior project. He needed someone in the movie with Tae Kwon Do/martial arts skills, so he wanted to know if I was interested in it. HECK FRIGGIN’ YEAH I WAS INTERESTED!!!!!! It’s my belief that you can instantly tell how cool someone is by asking them if they want to be a part of a zombie movie. Anything less than a complete affirmative response means that said person =/= coolest individual alive. Not that my answer of yes is evidence of being ridiculously awesome (I mean, I am, but that’s not where I’m going with this :p), though. If you shoot the idea down, you’re lame. I might still love you and think the world of you, but you’re lame. There I said it :p Moving on, so I left lunch with Adam hopeful about this prospect of zombie sweetness, but I wasn’t expecting too much to come from it in general. Either way, I quickly put it out of my mind in order to concentrate on meeting the Mormons. I headed out of Sanford and basically across the street over to their church in order to communicar with them. Not going to lie you, my friends, I felt pretty good about how the whole thing went. I think I was as respectful and open as I could’ve been in presenting my thoughts to them (and likewise, they were money as well), and I think everything went over pretty well. I left their place about an hour later after exchanging a bunch of papers printed off the internet (my studying material) for a copy of the Book of Mormon and feeling solid. Sorenson and Spencer said they’d call me again at some point again to hang again. Solid.

*aside* Here it is, now two months after this meeting, and I still have yet to get a call from them. I’m picturing a Star Wars-esque scenario in my mind in relation to this whole thing. Like say Sorenson is walking down the street with some other Mormon (we’ll call him “Mormon N00b”), and they’re just trying to share their beliefs with whoever they come across. I’m envisioning both of them spotting me and then Mormon N00b leaning over to Sorenson saying, “Hey, we should talk to that guy.” Then Sorenson leans back over and shakes his head saying, “No, the Word is strong with that one.” Then they both avert their eyes to the ground and walk to the other side of the street. Ok, so it’s probably not like that (and I'm a toolshed for even imagining that), but why haven’t they called me yet? Seriously, though, nice people, and I truly do admire them in some ways. Like, they just walk down the street talking to EVERYONE about their thoughts. That’s faith and dedication. Props to them. Obviously, I disagree with their message, but everyone’s got the right to worship as they choose, and I’m not going to hate on them for their choice. I love them as people the same way that I love everyone else. Plus, they’re just cool peeps.
Moving on, so my bro Phil Honzay (you may remember him from such blog entries at “Cities Ownage”) came over to the U a day after this meeting to chill and hang before I started my spring break. He and I were just talking in the living room of 1018 (my house) when I got a phone call. I pulled the cellular talking device out of my pocket and saw that it was Adam Wells calling me. Interesting, I thought (ok, I probably didn't actually think that, but meh, tu sabes). I answered, and he quickly informed me that he wanted me to come and read for the part in his movie. I was actually a bit surprised that this was all going down at all, let alone so quickly. We agreed to meet and do it up the next day (Friday, 3/13/09) before Phil and I went home for spring break.So it was probably around noon the next day that Phil and I went over to meet Wells to rock this. We all got ourselves some quick lunch together before we went up to his room to do the reading.

“So what’s my motivation/thought-process for this scene?” I asked as I read over the lines he wanted me to rock.
“Zombie apocalypse has hit Sanford hall.”
“Ok.”

While Adam set up the camera to record the try-out, I thought over the situation and how my character was supposed to be this martial arts BA dude as I took another gander over the scene. I decided to read it rather emotionlessly. Just as stoic as I could. “Ready?” he asked.

Straight-up, I didn’t think I read the part very well. There was no emotion in it at all. Granted, that’s what I was going for, but I just didn’t like the way it came off in general. But meh, whatevs. Phil and I bounced out of the room and headed back to my house after I thanked Wells for the opportunity. I was pretty sure I’d never hear from him again about the whole thing.

Incorrect. A couple weeks after this, I was just chilling in 1018 on my computer with my roommates, Eric and Weston, when Adam walked in and moved straight toward me. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You got the part.” I was taken aback by this but really excited about the whole thing. “The other guy reading for the part was really good, but he doesn’t have Tae Kwon Do skills, and I can’t let an opera singer be in my movie.” Good enough for me. I was in like something that's literally inside something else.
Another maybe week or so went by as Wells kept looking for other people to be in the movie. Then, as is his style apparently, he called me up out of nowhere on a Sunday afternoon and asked if I could meet him at Middlebrook for dinner that night (Sunday, 4/5/09) as he was meeting members of the U of M Zombie Club in order to go over a bunch of stuff for the movie. Yep. I said Zombie Club. That actually exists at the U of M. How friggin' cool is that? Very. Very cool, indeed. I guess it was just started this past year, but somehow Adam found out about them, and they wanted in with this thing. Legitsies. I met Wells at the door to Middlebrook that day and walked in with him. Neither of us necessarily knew who we were looking for, but we found everyone pretty quickly. I remember meeting a couple members of the club (one of them being Phil, who was to play my right-hand man Dominick) and a girl named Mara. Mara was to play Marie, my love interest for the film. She and I chatted as we all went down to the dining area to meet the rest of the Zombie Club. There must’ve been at least 12 people chilling at the table in total that afternoon/evening. Adam went over basic specs of the whole thing when a shorter girl walked up to the table.

*Adam spots her* “Hey, can you act?”
“Yeah,” said that girl.
“You wanna be in the movie?”
“Sure.”

Boom! And we’d casted the fourth main character. Randomness for the win! So we all talked it out for a bit while we decided what days were going to be best for shooting and the like. It looked like Mondays and Wednesdays were what was going to be rocked (with filming started the next day). That kind of sucked because I typically had prayer pod and Bible study on them respectively, but dag-nabbed I was going to turn down the opportunity to be in a zombie movie. Frigg. I busted out of a sweet Tae Kwon Do class the next day (Monday, 4/6/09) and headed back to 1018 to quick change into some non-descript clothing and get ready to rock some zombie awesomeness. We were supposed to all meet in the lobby of Sanford at 7:00, so obviously I was there at 6:55 just chilling and waiting for everyone to show up. A few minutes passed by and then five members of the Zombie Club showed up (four dudes – one of them Phil and then one girl), We stood around and chatted for few until Adam showed up, and we all headed downstairs to the game room of the building to make it happen.

We were going to film the epic 5-on-1 zombie fight that day between my character, Michael, and… well… five zombies. I played around with the weapon Adam had chosen for me, a tripod, while we went over what was going to go down for that scene. Well, I shouldn’t say that. That implies that there was a plan for this thing. There wasn’t at all. We were bouncing ideas off each other when Adam called Paul, who was one of my housemates and a fellow member of the TKD Club in order to help choreograph everything. Oddly enough, Paul wasn’t studying for a test the next day (crazy Institute of Technology kids and their plethora of tests), and he agreed to come over and help a bit for a while.
As we waited for his arrival, the five members of the Zombie Club who’d come started getting themselves decked out in fake blood and tearing their shirts up a bit. At this time, Wells decided it was as good a time as any to tell me one of the things he’d actually figured out for this scene. He wanted me to unlock the tripod (while it was in a non-extended position) and then quickly extend it toward the camera in some sort of a threatening manner in order to start off the fight. He practiced it himself a couple times until a couple of pieces of the tripod actually splintered off and strewed themselves about the room. Failboat. Unfortunately, we didn’t get that on film, but at least we had an extra tripod for some reason.
By this time, Paulie had arrived, and all the zombies were ready to go. Problem, though, one of the girls (I think her name was Alex) pointed out that Phil couldn’t actually be a zombie in this scene because he was supposed to be one of the main characters. Fracaso. Looks like we just had four zombies and one dude with nothing to do. Meh, what’re you going to do, I guess.

Nonetheless, though, it was time to film the opening where I was to extend the tripod toward the camera and look like some sort of awesome, menacing individual. Adam hadn’t scripted any lines for this part, so he asked if I had any ideas of what to say. Smurf yeah, I did! For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Mortal Kombat fan and have yearned to quote Johnny Cage in a moderately legitimate setting. With this in mind, I looked back at the crazy ginger that is Adam Wells and said, “Can I say, ‘All right. Let’s dance.’”? “Yeah, that cool,” he said. Sweetness on a boat!!! Cross one dream of mine off the list!
“Quiet on set!” yelled Adam. “And… action!”

“All right,” I said as I unlocked the tripod. I waited for Wells’ signal and then snapped it open at the camera. “Let’s dance.”

“Cut!”

Right there I knew that this was going to be a sweet shoot. I’d already gotten to live out one dream, and I’d only said four words thus far. But now came the hard part. Choreographing a 5-on…err… 4-on-1 fight scene. Paul and I talked it over as Adam filmed the four zombies’ approach of me (the one girl, Alex I believe, crawled over a ping pong table while the dudes stumbled around it). Not going to lie, they all looked darn fine as the undead and had great walks. Everything looked totally legit.
We figured that the best way for Michael (me) to combat the zombies was to spread them out first. So we decided that I would push away the three guys with the tripod as they got near to me, turn to Alex on the table, and smash her dome with a downward swing. I was a bit worried at first because I had no idea how hard to do the push. I played around with it a bit but always threw it pretty weakly because I didn’t want to drop anyone. One of the guys said the amount of force I was using was really solid, so I just stuck with the low level. Even with that, one of them almost went down once. *shrugs*

But yeah, it took a while but we eventually figured out how to roll the rest of the scene. Another person from the class that Wells was doing this for showed up (Amira – sp?) showed up as well to help us rock it out. After I donked Alex with the tripod, I turned back to the dude zombies who were now conveniently somewhat lined up for me. I smashed the tripod against the neck of the first one, dropping him to the ground. I then stuck the crazy-sweet implement into him and moved on to the next one. This cat threw a punch at me, which I ducked; I then slipped around him to his back and broke his neck. I pushed him into the last guy to create some space as he flew up against the wall. And as a sweeeeeet finish, I threw a skipping/sliding inside-out crescent kick at his facial region, which put him on his back.
After this carnage occurs, I stare briefly at the last fallen zombie, turn, and then walk out of the room. On my way, I pull the tripod out of the first dude zombie and keep on keeping on. The scene ends with my kicking open the door and exiting. What Wells showed me that night on the playback of the camera looked super-tight. By this time, it was around like 10:30 or so, so the whole process took about 3 ½ hours, but whatevs, it was waaaaaait. *Re-reads over last paragraph* Wow, that was choppy as frigg, wasn't it? Meh.

After this epic night of shooting, we took the next almost week off as Wells was busy with something on Wednesday. He wanted to shoot again over the weekend (specifically Saturday) but unfortunately, it was Easter (well, not unfortunately at all, Easter pretty much = the greatest day ever, but you know, unfortunate for filming zombie movies and the like), so I was heading home for said fin de semana. This was actually perfect, though in one respect, because Adam wanted me to have all of my Tae Kwon Do belts for one of the expository scenes, so people would be able to know of my character’s martial arts-ness. I brought my script home, though, and spent most of the car ride back up to the cities that Sunday trying to memorize my lines (as we were going to rock it at 5:00 when I got back), which believe you me, is pretty friggin’ tough on an hour of sleep. But meh, I’ll sleep when I’m dead… or rather, when I’m UNdead – OH SNAP! Foreshadowing for the win, son!
I got back up to Minneapolis at around 4:30 that Sunday afternoon (4/12/09), which gave me just enough time to quickly eat an apple, check my emails, talk to my housemate/broheim Potter, grab the TKD gear I’d brought up from home, and get ready for awesomeness.

I walked into Sanford at around 4:57 due to my absurd punctuality skills and just chilled whilst waiting for err’body else to show up. It didn’t take long before Sara, the short-statured girl that Adam cast on the spot that one night at dinner, showed up. She and I chatted a bit before Wells popped up. At this point, it was substantially after 5:00, and we were the only three people there. Failboat. Sara informed our director that the members of the Zombie Club were apparently super-busy with stuff, and in particular Phil, who was supposed to play one of the main characters (Dominick). Not good. Even worse, she made it seem as if he wasn’t going to be able to make ANY of the shoots. Really not good. Adam and I talked about this for a bit before I came to the realization that I needed to call my broheim Geoff. You may remember Geoff from such past blog entries as being the guy who picked me up from the airport after I got back from Spain or being one of the cats that I enjoy tacos with on Tuesday, or any other place. Point is, he was my suitemate my sophomore year, and he’s going to be my roommate again next year. He’s the man. I’d told him about the movie a few days prior, and he sounded really intrigued, so I said that I’d call him at some point so he could be one of the zombies. Well… a part a bit bigger just looked like it had opened up. I busted open my phone and made the call, and he was on board right away. The crazy cat said that he’d be over to Sanford, which is like a 20-plus minute walk from his Melrose apartment, as soon as he could be. Money in the bank, son!
I told Wells about this, and we were all totally in business. In our downtime waiting for him, we headed off to Adam’s room (in Sanford) and set it up to make it Michael’s. We put up a couple of zombie-esque poster dealies that he’d just printed off, hung my TKD belts from his bed, and then opened and placed my bag of gear on his floor with my uniform spilling out of it.

We went over the specs for this shot, and it didn’t seem too difficult. Basically, this was the phone call that Michael makes to his “love interest” Marie (played by Mara). I talk about how I was just attacked by a zombie and that it’s about to hit the fan. Pretty cake, right? Turns out not so much. I sat in Wells’ rolly, computer chair with my phone to my ear and proceeded to forget most of my lines. Weak. Not going to lie, it was a bit weird having a phone convo with myself, too; maybe that was what threw me off. Nah, I probably just sucked. Again, I rocked it in a way that was pretty much as hollow as I could do. I didn’t like the way it sounded at all, but I felt that was how my character would do it. He’s been preparing for the pending zombie apocalypse for who knows how long, is perfectly calm about it, and after getting attacked by the first zombie (this scene takes place after a brief fight) is starting to lose his humanity. Sounded bad, but seemed (and still does seem) right. I guess. Meh.
It took a bit of time, but eventually I remembered the lines to a good enough point, and we finished the scene. Solid. It was during this time of filming that Geoff texted me to let me know that he was in Sanford. I went down to the lobby and brought him over to Wells’ room to get him up to speed on everything. He seemed down and was ready to rock it. Which he pretty much had to be because we were going to shoot his first scene pretty much right after he got there.

The basis of this shot was that I had just talked to Marie on the phone and was going to find my right-hand man Dominick and get him up to speed on everything (wait, didn’t I JUST write that? Coincidence? Probably). This was actually one of my favorite scenes to shoot as it was just Geoff and me acting like Geoff and me. The scene opens up with Dominick (Geoff’s character, remember) standing in the middle of some room, holding a bike pump in a scared fashion. I sneak up behind him and whisper “Dominick” in his ear. The scared character jumps up and drops the first and only f-bomb of the movie (which is good, because a PG-13 movie’s only allowed to have one of such a word… not that anyone cared, I just think that’s an interesting fact). We then briefly proceed to talk before we head out of the room to go find Marie.
At this point in the afternoon/evening, Mara had arrived and was ready to shoot her end of the phone scene, so we all wandered off to the room of one of Wells’ female friends to rock that out. Mara’s character Marie is basically a valley girl. She’s kind of air-headed and just, well… she’s a valley girl. That’s what it is. But yeah, Geoff and I obviously weren’t needed for this part, so we sat around in the hallway outside of the cuarto and talked with some girl there who Adam had brought in to be a zombie for a different scene. Unfortunately, though, we never got around to filming the shot that she was going to be a part of, so that girl basically ended up wasting several hours of her day. Sadsies, indeed. Yeah, there’s no real point to my mentioning that, but I’m trying to hit all the details here, people. Enjoy it! This is basically behind-the-scenes of Dorm of the Dead here. Get excited and be thankful! :p

It was also during this down time that Geoff and I headed off to the bathroom in order to get some fake blood on ourselves. Sara (who played Jenny) wisely pointed out that we should probably be bloody after fighting zombies (at the point in the movie where the next scene was to take place, I’ve killed two and Dominick’s killed one). Not going to lie, putting on the fake blood was pretty cool. It was just a tube of some stuff that Adam had picked up from a shoppe of some sort I believe in St. Paul, but it was cool. It looked pretty legit, and it was just cool to wear because you got a lot of weird looks from people just in general. Noice. Geoff and I sat outside the room for basically forever while we waited for Mara to finish up her scene. The final prognosis was good, though, as everyone came out of the room pretty happy with themselves. Solid. I can only imagine that that scene was sweetness on a boat. Wait? Imagine? Haven’t you seen the movie already? Don’t you know if it was money or not? We’ll get to that later, Amy.

It was now time to film Dominick’s and Michael’s meeting of Marie in her room. The idea here was that we had just finished killing two zombies and were picking her up to go over the next portion of the plan. He and I walk over to her place and knock; she answers and it all begins. Now the idea between Marie and Michael, as mentioned before, is that they’re love interests of some sort. The movie never really goes into it too much, but it’s evident that Marie wants Michael pretty bad, and he’s somewhat receptive to it but mostly indifferent. Now, I’m imagining that some of that indifference is due to the whole ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE thing going on, and they probably were dating or something to that effect before this whole thing went down. Point is, that’s the backstory there. This scene has another one of my favorite lines. Upon opening the door, Marie’s freaking out a bit about the whole thing (and in specific, the blood on my face), and Michael looks at her and says, “Don’t worry, it’s not my own blood.” Legit. ALMOST a Simpsons reference (Nobody makes me bleed my own blood – right, Nelson?). I pull the golf club out of my belt that I’d grabbed when I left my room after the phone call, hand it to her, and then the three of us head off to Jenny’s room to meet her and keep surviving. This greatness marked the end of the day’s shooting. Sweet. We all met up again at around 7:00 or so the next day (4/13/09) to keep locking this thing down. We had another full night of shooting ahead of us and a lot of scenes to rock. Sara was finally going to get to do some acting on this night too (after spending the previous night holding the boom mic). Legit.

The first scene on tap for the night was to take place in the room of Jenny (again, played by the aforementioned Sara). The three of us had made our way over there, and it was time to get her as well and get her abreast of what was going down. Yet ANOTHER sweet line occurs here. But first, the idea behind Jenny is that she’s short and annoying, so she can’t do anything. Straight-up. Like she has all sorts of ideas and the like, but we pretty much just ignore and shoot her down due to her not being vertically signficant.

“…It’s that pip-squeak Rudy” – Moe
*trying to get into bus* “What I lack in height, I make up for in *door closes on him, struggles to open it back up* obnoxiousness. *tumbles away” – Rudy

Simpsons, son! But anyways, back to that line I just mentioned. My character’s explaining the plan to everyone when I say that I don’t want to stay in such a small room. I look over to Jenny and say “Sorry, but it’s true,” and she looks back and all dejectedly says “I know it’s small.” Hilariousness! This scene ends with Dominick pulling out the bat he’d been carrying and handed it to Jenny as we all exit the room. The next shot we filmed actually was supposed to take place right before this scene. Marie, Dominick, and Michael had just left Marie’s room and were standing outside that of Jenny and talking about the zombies that Geoff and I had dispatched recently. This scene’s notable only for the fact that Geoff mentions how he didn’t think the zombies were too difficult to take care of. I look back at him with contempt and say that they weren’t too difficult in that open space, and that a bunch of them in tight quarters would be really tough to deal with.

On that note, this is probably the time where I talk about the premise behind Geoff’s character, Dominick. He’s basically a little girl at the beginning of the movie. He’s scared and pretty much incapable of killing a zombie. However, throughout the entirety of the film, the character gets stronger and stronger and gains more and more confidence. He’s also quite jealous of Michael, and the idea with what he said here was that he was trying to impress Marie because… well… he wants her (and just what Michael has in general).

His shift sort of mirrors my character’s shift as well. As he’s gaining strength, I’m losing my humanity. Each zombie kill and the supposed incompetence of my friends drive me closer and closer to the edge as I become less and less human. It’s almost as if I’m becoming zombified without actually becoming a zombie. My eventual turn into a zombie (spoiler :p) is only logical because there’s nowhere further for my character to drop when that occurs. He literally HAS to become a zombie at that point.So Dominick/Geoff reaches his peak in strength just as I hit the bottom in humanity. Right as my character dies and is about to fully turn into a zombie, he volunteers without hesitation to kill me. It’s pretty money if you think about it. I’m not sure if Adam actually wrote the script with that in mind, but that’s the way that Geoff and I took it (and if he did, nicely played on his part. Heck, nicely played on his part anyway. Super-cool script just in general.).

After finishing this scene, Mara, Sara, Geoff, and I head to the game room for the opening of the 4-on-1 fight scene. The four of us enter the room and are taken aback by seeing four, count ‘em four, zombies standing on the opposite side of the room. I respond the only way I know how with “Oh snap!” and tell everyone to go to the lounge and wait for me there as I step forward to take out the undead creatures. After I pass out of the shot, Marie notices someone lying on the ground (Billy, played by Adam – which is legit that he was able to have a little part in his movie) and goes to help him and brings him out of the room. A quick scene, but totally sweet. Heck, EVERYTHING about this movie was sweet. The script, the weapons, and ESPECIALLY the cast. Sooooooooo money.This little part of the scene leading up to Marie’s grabbing of Billy makes me giggle (if you will :p) as Geoff had a couple of issues with his lines at first. The idea was for Dominick and Jenny to tell Marie to get Billy and bounce as quickly as possible. Well, for one of the takes Geoff said something to the effect of “Leave him, and let’s go.” Now obviously, that doesn’t sound to funny right here, but believe you me, t’was quite enjoyable, as evidenced by this smiley face :-)

The final shot for that day occurs just after I’ve finished taking out the four zombies. I bust into the lounge as everyone’s kind of chilling and taking care of Billy. Marie runs over and hugs me as I toss my tripod onto a chair that’s nearby. She’s surprised that I’m alive, and I respond by telling her that of course I was, and that the zombies weren’t too difficult in that open space. I say this line condescendingly as I stare at Dominick (who’s off screen at the time), which relates back to what he says outside of Jenny’s room a couple of scenes earlier.

I talk to everyone about where we go from here when I notice Billy slumped over on the couch, clearly in pain. I walk over to him asking who he is as I look at the wound on his shoulder. I ask him how he got it, and he responds by telling me (in a few more words) that he was bitten by a zombie. Next comes the part where I get overpowered by a girl. I grab the golf club to kill him, and Marie totally stops me via clasping onto the head of the shaft (gross) and pulling it down.She wants to know what I’m doing, so I tell her that he’s turning into a zombie, so we have to kill him. The zombie disease spreads through contact with human blood, so anything as little as even a scratch on a human leads to their turning into one of the creatures. Thus, Billy’s got to go down before the situation gets even worse. Makes sense. But before we can get to actually killing of Wells’ character, we cut the shot, called it a night, and all headed home to our families.

This seems like as good a point as any to talk about a grammar issue that a lot of people have: showing possession with a word that ends with an “s.” What? Yeah, that’s poorly explained. Like say for example “Wells’ movie” or the “The New York Giants’ football stadium” or “Hes’s book.” The standard is that for a singular noun (i.e. a word that doesn’t end in s), to show possession you add an apostrophe and then an “s” (Aaron’s blog). A normal plural just adds an apostrophe after the “s” (The dogs’ gathering). Pretty simple, right? Yep. Well, the issue comes along when showing possession with names that end in “s” (like “Wells” and “Hes”). The rule is basically that you treat them as singular; you add the apostrophe and finish with the “s” (Hes’s book). But you’re probably noticing that I’m always writing “Wells’ [whatever].” You put the apostrophe afterwards without adding an “s” if the sound the word makes is like that of a “z.” Like “Jesus” or “Moses.” Both of the final “s’s” in those words sounds like “z’s,” so you just add it at the end (Jesus’ gift of salvation). The same sound is true for Adam’s last name. Thus, you just drop the apostrophe at the end of it without the extra “s.” There you go, grammar lesson for the day :-)A couple days later on Wednesday (4/15/09), we returned for the next day of awesomeness that in no way could be contained in a can. We picked up right where we left off on Monday with the lounge scene as Michael tries to kill Billy. We re-shot a bit of what we did the previous time for the purpose of continuity and just to make sure we had enough different angles and the like for everything before we moved onto Wells’ character’s death scene.

The original lines in the script called for me to just ask Billy if he were ok with being killed, and without any sort of fight he acquiesces, and that’s his end as I smash him with the golf club. Obviously, this doesn’t really make any sort of sense as it seems to stand to reason that someone would fight to… um… not get wrecked by a golf club. So we all played with some lines for a bit before deciding on what ending up becoming my favorite part of the film.

*standing in front of Billy (who’s slumped over on the couch in definite pain) with the golf club* “Are you ok with this?” asks Michael coldly.
“Are you sure there’s no cure?” asks Billy.
“I’m not waiting around long enough to find out.”
“[Says something else that I don’t remember right now]”
“I don’t even trust myself in that scenario.”
“Don’t you have a heart?”
*shakes head* “Screw this! You’re a dead man already!” *swings club*

Super-mega money. After Adam’s character’s death, logically we had to remove him from the room, so his body wouldn’t be in the way for any other parts of the movie. This led into what was thankfully the only injury of the movie. After Michael tells Dominick to get Billy out of there, he walks over to the couch, pulls him to the floor, and drags him out the door. The whole thing looks really cool, but for one of the takes, Adam forgot to tuck his shirt in, so he ended up getting some wicked rug burns on his back. Now THAT’S heart, kiddies! Take note! :-) On a related note, how perfect is this pic I just stumbled upon?! D'argent a la banque!
After rocking this, Geoff’s character walks back into the room with a certain air of authority and asks if we can agree to kill any of us who becomes a zombie. Michael fully agrees and then starts talking about the proper way to go about killing zombies when suddenly the door to the lounge busts open, and everyone’s attention snaps over to it to see what’s up. At this point, the huge zombie fight scene begins, but we were saving that sweetness for another day.

So that right there ended the group scenes for the night, so everybody but me, Adam, Joel (who was going to play a zombie), and the girl holding the boom mic who was also a part of Wells’ class whose name escapes me at this point (Danielle?) went home. We still had two more quick shots to rock before we finished up for the night, so we headed over to Adam’s room to do up the opening to the movie.

This started with a close-up of one of the zombie poster-esque things in Michael’s/Wells’ room and continued by having a pan around said cuarto showing all my TKD belts hanging off the bed and my uniform that was coming out of my bag on the floor. Eventually, the camera finds me sitting in the chair reading a book. What book is it, you ask? Well, Adam went off to talk to a friend of his from elsewhere in Sanford to find and borrow a good one. He came back with something that was just fantastical in terms of being ironical.He entered the room and handed me “How Then Shall We Live?” Sweet. Ya see, because the movie’s about zombies and death and the like, and the book’s about living and other some such things. AH! I see what Adam did there. That IS good. Yeah, it is. I sifted through the chapters trying to find the one that was the most poignant to the concept before I stumbled upon one about the Renaissance/Age of Enlightenment. Noice. So I sat myself down in the chair while the girl whose name I can’t remember did up one of the only three hand-held camera shots of the movie. Not going to lie, I was actually reading the book while the filming was going on (which was a bit of a struggle because I don’t wear my glasses in the movie, because hey, zombie killers don’t wear glasses, but meh, it was all hood), and as a result, twice almost missed Adam scratching on the door at the end of the scene, which was my cue to look up to the noise and go investigate. But nonetheless, we made it happen.

Pretty cake shot. But yeah, that noise I mentioned. Turns out it’s a zombie. Michael gets up and heads over to the door to see what was a-going on when gets COMPLETELY run over by the “Football Zombie.” The idea for this was two-fold in nature. One, that zombies retain their human characteristics after they turn (so a person who excelled in football as a human would be good at football as a zombie – thus, good tackling skills. This set the stage for my keeping my martial arts skills after I become zombified later). Second, that martial arts > football and thereby setting my character up as a bad mother-shut-yo-mouth.Originally, Adam understandably wanted a big dude to play the part of this zombie, but EVERYONE we talked to was either busy or didn’t want in. Sadsies. But we got Joel to do it who was a member of the Zombie Club as well. He was a pretty small cat, but he WENT for that tackle and put me on my back and down pretty friggin’ well. Sweet.

The next scene (and the last one that we filmed that night) is me on said back with Joel the Football Zombie on top of me in what one might describe as a bit of an uncomfortable position. I’ll leave the description at that. But yeah, the script called for me to break Joel’s neck in some way, so we played around with that for a bit before agreeing on my throwing up a triangle choke and doing the breaking with my legs. So cool. Good gravy, this movie was cash. I got to say sweet stuff, do legit moves, and most importantly, work with some ridonkulously awesome people. Yeah, I’m mentioning that a lot, but it’s true, dag-nabbit!After the majority of each night’s shooting, I headed over to Centennial to rock the late night with my brohammers Chris and Nick, and this was no different in that respect. I walked most of the way with Joel, however. Turns out he was a pretty cool cat, and it was nice to get to know him a bit. He actually had some Tae Kwon Do experience as well and had trained in the IBBF just like I used to. Crazy. First person I’d ever met at college who’d done so. He trained specifically as a member of Eric Greenquist’s school, whom I’d met once or so in the past briefly. Legit and random. Always cool to see some other IBBF’er’s around. Not that this really means anything to any of you reading this (Amy), but you know, some of these things are just for me :p

But anyways, at the end of this night, the vast majority of the movie had been filmed, but we were still looking at a lot of stuff left, including what by far was going to be the most difficult shot to get… mostly due to the fact that it’s HARD to get people to agree to be zombies for some reason (weak). Anyways, the next day for shooting was to be a couple days later (4/19/09). That weekend was actually Campus Crusade for Christ’s spring retreat (that Adam went on as well), so that posed a bit of an issue in getting everything locked down. I also had a HUUUUUGE proposal due for my MGMT 3033W class due the next day (Monday) at noon. Not ideal at all.

I got back to my house at around some time that I can’t remember (thankfully before the rest of my roommates who had also gone on the retreat returned. I say this was fortunate because it gave me the bathroom without any issues as I had to shave, shower (darn continuity), and take an EPIC poop beforehand – camp food, let me tell you). I ran through all this as quickly as I could, but yeah… the horrible horrible food I’d eaten the previous 24 hours at the conference did a number on my stomach… just in case you were curious, Amy. *sings* Everybody poops. Some hurt. *shakes head*Anyways, after finishing that crap up (cheap pun!) I rolled back to my room to see that I’d missed a couple of Adam’s calls. I returned them as I started to go to town on the aforementioned proposal. He wanted me there as soon as possible, but this thing unfortunately had to come first. Thankfully, it was a group proposal, and I was blessed to be in the greatest group EVER (Team Go-pher Green for the win! – As a side note, this is the Target group, Amy). At this point, it was basically all done, I just had to do the works cited and edit it a bit before emailing it back to the ridiculously awesome Shawna for final revisions. Then she was going to send it out to everybody in the group, and Parag, Christoph, and Korbinian were going to go to Kinko’s and get it printed off/bound/everything. Such a fantastic group, and I didn’t even mention how great Jessie was as well. Everyone was/is super-mega cool and mad-props to everyone on that one for pulling it all together.

But yeah, after hammering out my part, I booked it over to Sanford for more zombie greatness. The only plan for the day was to shoot just Dominick’s and Michael’s 2-on-2 fight scene. Due to Sara’s coolness, she’d gotten two of her friends (who may or may not have been a part of the Zombie Club as well) to play the part of the undead for a bit that día. Yay! Cool freshmen! A rare find, indeed! Just kidding :p But seriously…

Moving on, these two girls were basically supposed to be “slutty ho-bag zombies,” so they ripped up their shirts a bit and messed up their hair before the scene to get into character. Here, Dominick and Michael had just found each other (wow, that sounds weird) and were heading over to find Marie when they run into these undead in the hallway leading to her room. The scene was pretty simple; we turn a corner and see them. Geoff’s character stops in his tracks and asks what to do. I look back over to him and say, “Don’t worry about it. Swing for their heads.” The “swinging”-ness directly references the crapfest of a movie that was Signs when at the end *spoiler alert* they figure out that they can kill the aliens via just swinging baseball bats at them (“Swing away.”). Oh, M. Night, how did you go from the Sixth Sense to that? And from that to The Happening? Not good at t’all.But yeah, after Michael reassures Dominick, both characters walk forward and go to town. I jab one in the face with the tripod, knocking her to the ground, before spinning the weapon and hitting her in the face with it as she’s lying on the floor while Geoff just straight smashes the other one’s head into the wall with his bike pump. Michael looks back at his compatriot, nods, and then they both head down the hall to Marie’s room.

A quick but sweet scene. A couple things stand out really well from this little one. The first thing was that the one girl that Geoff hits with the pump fell really awesomely. Like she just dropped straight to the ground. It’s kind of hard to describe, and you’re probably not getting the picture because… well… I’m not explaining it well in the slightest, but trust me on this, it looked really cool how natural she looked when she fell. Another memorable moment from this occurred while we were practicing the scene before filming and Geoff actually hit her in the head with the weapon. Not that hard, but it definitely made an audible thumping noise, and no doubt did not feel good. Thankfully, she was ok, and we all had a bit of a chuckle afterwards.

The final thing that really stands out was the issue we had in closing the tripod after Michael kills his zombie. We remembered that for the next scene where the dudes talk to Marie, the tripod isn’t extended anymore. The problem is that the tripod couldn’t stay open on its own, so we always had to put it in the locked position to keep it there. But logically we couldn’t really do a shot where my character unlocks it and closes it. It just wouldn’t look good. So we messed around with this for a while before one of the girls offered a pony tail to us to keep it open as opposed to locking it. It ended up working really well, and it looked super-cool when I closed it afterwards then as it unextended in two phases. However, the only scene where we really got it all to work right, the golf club that was still being held in my belt ended up getting oddly positioned after killing the zombie, so it got stuck between my legs and hindered normal walking, which made me look like even more of a tool than I probably already am. We eventually just moved on as this was basically an irrelevant add-on to the scene, and Adam was concerned about the pacing of the film. So unfortunately, this closing of the tripod part was cut but probably rightfully so. But the end of this scene marked the end of a relatively quick shooting day.Speaking of which, not really, but I’m just looking for a transition here, and I feel like I should write about this given the opening of this entry (and also what I’ll be writing about later in this crazy thing), I finally got a call back from the Mormons the other day (5/19/09). I was at a movie at the time (Star Trek – I swear, I’m not a Trekkie, though :p), though, so I couldn’t actually answer, but they left me an enjoyable little message. But before I get into this whole thing, let’s jump into the way-back machine to what I think was 5/10/09.

I had been walking down University Avenue to dinner to meet my broheims Nick and Chris for what promised to be some fantastic late-night Centennial hamburgers and the like when I saw a couple of Mormons walking a fair distance in front of me down the same street. I shot up a quick prayer that I’d be able to meet with some of them again in the near future as I watched them try and talk to a girl who was walking toward them. She put her head down and completely ignored them as she did her best to power walk past them. The poor cats tried their best to get her attention, but she wasn’t having any of it. By the time they had stopped trying to talk to her, I had reached them, so one of them shifted his attention over to me.

Apparently sometimes God likes to answer prayers immediately :-) We three engaged in a nice little conversation while I headed my way to Cen-Ten. After giving them some brief thoughts in relation to the concept of marketing the gospel (they’d asked what my major was and then followed-up by questioning how that might relate to religion and such), they asked if I’d ever heard of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Of course I responded that I had and that I’d actually met with Elders Spencer and Sorenson a couple months prior to talk about some things. Intrigued by this, they asked why I stopped meeting with the missionaries; to which I responded by saying that they told me that they’d call me to chill again, but they never actually did. They seemed to be briefly taken aback by this before shortly asking for my number and seeing if I were interested in meeting again with them. No doubt I was, so I gladly gave them my number before we parted ways.Nine days later, Elder Gillespie (who was one of the missionaries from that day) called me and left a message to see if I were available to meet some time. Well… turns out that I’m home for the summer, so I had no idea when I’d be up in the cities again to meet with them. And with that, I’d gotten a call from my old Bible study leader Ben earlier that day asking if I’d be around to meet within the next few days to talk about his coming mission trip to Australia. So I had two things that I really wanted (and should) to do dropped on me the same day. But yeah, O-town’s a bit of a jaunt from Minneapolis, and it’s hard to justify a trip up there to meet for only what probably would’ve amounted to like an hour and half in total, especially considering it would’ve entailed like four hours of driving.

The next day, though, I woke to find a Facebook post from the ever-so-awesome Erik Dikken asking if I wanted to join him up in the cities that weekend for Carolyn’s and Sara’s graduation. Oh, how the good Lord does provide. I made some phone calls and had everything set up by that afternoon. It’s ridiculously crazy how great God is and how amazing his plan is (Jeremiah 29:11). He’s truly got everything on lockdown, and it absolutely blows my mind sometimes. Soooooo good.

So everything went off without a hitch, and Saturday morning at about 6:50 in the morning, Ben came over to 1018, and we went over the basics of what his trip to Australia was going to entail and just chilled in general for a bit before I headed off to the Mormon church (conveniently located less than two blocks from the house) to meet them at 7:30. I arrived quite early (durr), so I walked around the block for an extra few minutes to kill a couple extra minutes, and just as I was about to enter their parking lot, I saw a car park and two men get out. One was Elder Gillespie whom I’d met before, and the other was the RIDONKULOUSLY tall Elder Brown (who I hadn’t really talked to before… I don’t think… outside of his saying “Good afternoon” to me one day as we crossed paths on University).

The three of us went inside the church all in good spirits and just talked about general things until we sat down in one of their rooms and got down into the deeper issues. Not surprisingly at all, Elders Gillespie and Brown are both pretty chill cats. They did their best to answer all my questions as humbly and graciously as possible. One thing that really stuck out and impressed me was that it really seemed as if they’d done their homework on me as they had some material with them that pertained to a few of the questions I’d had for Spencer and Sorenson before. The guys are definitely thorough and have a strong faith. No one can doubt that. We even went as far as to read Chapter 76 of the Book of Doctrines and Covenants (which again, is one of their sources of authority). All 119 verses of it as Gillespie thought that would answer a lot of my preguntas. Our whole meeting lasted about an hour and a half or so, which was well beyond the 45 or so minutes that these meetings are apparently supposed to last, so that was really cool that they took that much time to talk too. We left by saying that we’d definitely get together again sometime in the future as it was clear that we had a lot more to talk about. Plus, I think they enjoyed it as much as I did, so why not?Good stuff, and I’m for sure looking forward to meeting with them again. There’s seriously nothing I enjoy more in life than a good faith-based conversation. But anyways, back to the matter at hand here: ZOMBIES!!!

T’was the next day (Monday, 4/20/09) when we filmed again. Mara wasn’t going to be able to make the shooting that day, so there was only one scene we could film that day: the gathering shot with Dominick and Jenny. This occurs right after Michael gets bitten by the zombie. My character knows that he has to be killed as soon as possible, but he first reluctantly agrees to snagging some supplies quickly beforehand. He and Marie split from the previously mentioned two as both groups go to grab stuff.

So Adam, Geoff, Sara, and I all went into some random room in Sanford that contained all sorts of weird items (food, a first-aid kit, trophies from like 1954, and other randoms) to rock this one. For the first time, I got to rock the boom mic for a bit as I wasn’t in this scene. Not going to lie, it was kinda fun holding that giant, black phallic device. I really liked the way this scene came off too. It was just Geoff and Sara grabbing crap and putting it into paper bags, but it all seemed quite solid and natural (I mean, this scene doesn’t exactly stretch any acting abilities, but it just came off well, I thought). The night obviously ended quite pretty quickly, but it was good, and we got another scene done with. At this point, Adam said he was feeling pretty burned out doing this, so he was hoping to finish everything off on Wednesday.So clearly, we were looking at an epic night of filming two days later when I walked into Sanford after Tae Kwon Do. I moved past the plethora of people standing outside the dorm partaking in what appeared to be some sort of a building-wide BBQ in order to get inside and meet my peeps. After Sara, Geoff, and Adam arrived we went to town trying to find people to be zombies for the epic fight scene that we had to shoot that day. Turns out it was a convenient day for said BBQ as we went off talking to people and asking if they wanted a part in the movie. I can’t tell you how many people we conversed with, but eventually we got two people to agree to being in it (and one of them was definitely bringing a friend with him, so we had three from these convos). Along with this, two of Geoff’s roommates, Tommy and Joel, said they’d be in it, and Joel was bringing his girlfriend Melissa as well. So we were looking at six people at that point.

We told those peeps to come to the lounge at about 8:30 or 9:00 for shooting (as some people were watching Lost in there at that time on TV, and Wells had been told that he needed to let them ver that). So in the bit of time we had before this, we headed off to the Sanford kitchen area to shoot Marie’s and Michael’s gathering scene. Since this was to take place after the big zombie fight (and after my character’s zombification starts ), I was supposed to be really bloodied and starting to look a bit zombie-like, but we needed to rip my shirt and such for that, so we did our best to shoot around all of that. You know, because we can’t un-rip my shirt or something to that effect... Or can we? No, no, we cannot. Mara was definitely money in this scene as she dug around through the refrigerator while I sat slumped over in a chair partially propping myself up with the golf club that she’d handed me before beginning her search.

We were able to get some really sweet natural shots of her reaction to sniffing some milk in there that was actually spoiled as well. Sweet. Or even spoiled, if you will. Yeah, that was lame, I know :p Eventually, she grabs all the stuff she needs and helps me out of the room as I basically fall on her and walk into the doorway upon our exit. After completing this, we headed over to the lounge and got back to calling people to be zombies.On top of all the talking we’d done that day to get personas, Adam had put together a Facebook event on Monday night inviting people to be in it as well. A couple people from there said they’d be in it too. So things were looking pretty decent if everyone was going to show up. Of course, we still did our best to call people and get as many as we could to be there just in case. We were still scrambling when Megan, who was one of the people I’d talked to at the BBQ called a couple friends of hers.

A couple MORMON friends of hers! Now THAT was a long shot, and not going to lie, I had full confidence that they weren’t going to be able to do it for whatever reason, but I’ll be jiggered, they agreed! Holy friggin’ crap! So with this, we had eight people from that day who were going to come plus however many were going to show from the Facebook event. Well… turns out that it was quite good that we went so hard with the recruiting that day as only one showed from there, another Crusader in Hannah. Nine people in total. Legit.

Elders Spencer and Brown walked in while Sara was putting makeup on some of the other peeps, and my head promptly exploded due to the awesomeness. I hadn’t really met Brown before, Spencer… well, you already know. I went over and gave a brief what-up to them before they started getting decked out in their zombie gear. Dinero, conozca el banco.The Mormons had to be back at their church by 9:30, so it was paramount that we rocked everything as we quickly as possible, so while all the zombies got ready for shooting, Geoff, Adam, and I tried to figure out exactly how the scene was going to work amidst all the chaos that was going on around us. We decided that since the Mormons had to bounce so quickly, they had to be finished off first, and we’d kind of work off that.

The plan was for my character to take the lead in the fight by grabbing the tripod off the chair that I’d thrown it on earlier and then pushing the first two zombies of the bunch of them that were funneling in the door (Spencer and another dude) to the wall. At that point, I turned to Elder Brown (who was third in line) and cracked him in the head with the weapon. As he fell, I continued my momentum from the strike and threw a spinning hook kick to Spencer’s head and then hit the other dude in the melon with the tripod, which sent him to the corner where I finished him off with an elbow strike.After these three went down, Michael turns and sees a zombie (played by Hannah) sneaking up on her. He yells, and she turns in fright and accidentally donks her in the face with the golf club, killing her. Dominick then turns and maneuvers past the tripping Zombie Tommy and crunks Joel in the head with the bike pump before turning back to the now fallen Tommy and finishing him off. In the background of all this, Jenny pushes Zombie Megan to the ground behind one of the chairs in the lounge.

Dominick revels in his two kills as another zombie slinks up behind him. Jenny yells as Michael comes up and breaks this one’s neck with the tripod. Marie runs up to and grabs my character as she screams about Zombie Melissa’s coming in the door. My head snaps to her as I whip the tripod at her; she falls into the door opening device (you know what I’m talking about, like the long opener dealies on those double-door kind of things – like, not a handle or a knob, but rather those long things instead…), and it opens behind her as she falls to the ground. The apparent last of them. Apparent. Dunh dunh DUNH!

It’s a quick scene, but a lot of stuff goes down in those few seconds. As per usual, there be a few really memorable things that really stand out. Most obviously, I GOT TO KILL TWO ZOMBIE MORMONS!!!!!! I feel like I lived out a piece of the American dream right there. Now, as I’ve stated before, despite our differing beliefs, I love the Mormons. They’re super-mega cool cats, and I really enjoy hanging with them, but the American public as a whole isn’t necessarily that fond of them. So just because of that, the whole thing’s pretty sweet. I’m reminded of that awesome scene in the Simpsons where Bart and Lisa have awakened the dead, so the whole family goes back to rectify the situation when Homer (who’s packing a shotgun) spots Flanders and promptly blasts him away. “You shot the Zombie Flanders!” exclaims Bart. “He was a zombie?” retorts Homer. Greatness. “You shot the Zombie Mormons!” “They were zombies?” Noice.The next couple of funny things relate to Zombie Melissa. In what I believe was our second take of this shot, after I broke the neck of the zombie sneaking up on Geoff’s character, I turned to get her, but instantly stopped in my tracks when I saw some dude who I had no idea who he was. I raised the tripod and then just completely froze as he stood there next to a confused Melissa. After Adam yelled cut, the guy explained that he just wanted to watch all of what was going on. The guy almost walked into what could’ve been a shot to the dome by a piece of filming equipment, but thankfully he didn’t, and we just got a really comical and awkward moment.

Speaking of Melissa, she was the unfortunate victim of the door twice as she tried to open it with her fall. Sadly for her (and hilariously for us :p), the door failed to open a couple times on her dropping, so she basically just jacked herself up against the hard metal. On the plus side, she didn’t hurt herself too bad; although, she did get a bruise I believe (hmm… I guess there were two mild injuries on set… three if you count the little hit that Geoff gave the Slutty Ho-Bag Zombie in the hallway). Funny funny stuff.

Awesomely enough, we finished this shot at like 9:23 or so, so the Mormons rolled out as quickly as they could afterwards while being very careful not to get any of the fake blood on their regular clothes (obviously they changed into some old stuff that they found in the lost and found or something before shooting). We still had a lot of work left to do, though, that night. So after they bounced, we got back to it.With all the zombies lying dead on the ground (except for the Mormons, obviously – we shot around where they would’ve been), the four main characters all came together to briefly go over the next plan of attack. Phase 2? Phase 2! 3 Ninjas reference FOR THE WIN, SON!!! Michael’s speaking in his most angered tone of the movie when out of nowhere Zombie Megan, who hadn’t been killed by Jenny, but rather just pushed to the ground, popped up and bit my character.

Michael (in theory) lets out a huge scream and goes Ape-shiz killing her before walking off to assess his situation. Well… let’s hold on a sec before we get into that. First, I should mention that after the fight scene and before this one, Adam did a quick shot of Zombie Megan twitching on the ground representing that she was still alive, but that was cut from the final version for pacing issues. And now I should talk about the trouble I had getting the yell right. I needed to Y.E.L.L. Loud. For whatever reason it wasn’t coming out right, and I was having some issues with it. I did two takes that I felt were decent at first, but apparently weren’t what Adam wanted. So he and Geoff both demonstrated for me quite nicely. After that, I hit what everyone agreed was a solid one, so we were ready to shoot it. We then shot I think three or four more takes of it (including close-ups and the like) of my just yelling and such. I eventually got it pretty decently, but I’ve definitely given out louder yells in the past (after Tae Kwon Do fights at tournaments). Besides my clear sucking that day, a couple complementary issues with this were the location of the boom mic (not very close to me) and the fact that Mara’s character screams when I get bitten as well – and she can SCREAM, so her higher pitched vocalization tended to drown mine out a bit. Nonetheless, eventually we got it to a point that everyone was satisfied enough with (thankfully, because my voice wasn’t feeling too great by the end of this).

But yeah, after we figured that out, the rest of the scene called for me to just straight break Zombie Megan’s neck and drop her over the chair that she had been hidden behind. After she goes down, Michael just goes nuts throwing punches at her until Marie tries to stop him. He pushes her away and storms off. Quickly he slows down, though, as he realizes what has to happen now. He turns back to the group, exasperated and asks which one of them wants to kill him. The group argues back and forth on this for a bit before Jenny convinces him to help them gather supplies before they do the deed. My character then drops the plan as the scene ends.After this, we headed back to the kitchen area to re-shoot Michael’s and Marie’s gathering scene to do Michael’s close-ups. Of course, we ended up doing the whole thing again for continuity reasons, but nonetheless, it’s always nice to have some extra shots in there just in case. Not going to lie, I also appreciated rocking a bit of a chiller scene after the epic zombie fighting-ness.

This didn’t take too long, though, so we shortly rolled back to the lounge to rock the shiz-hitting-the-fan scenes. The shot opens with my sitting on the couch in the same spot and the same fashion that Billy had been with Marie tending to me when Dominick and Jenny come back from their supplies gathering time. They bust in, and Mara’s character heads over to them as Dominick thanks me for helping with everything. I can barely muster a response as they look over the stuff they’ve all grabbed. Eventually, Marie stops and says that she thinks Michael’s gone. All three characters walk over, and Sara’s character checks my pulse.

They realize that I’m dead, so Geoff grabs the golf club and stands over ready to do the deed. Again, reminiscent of the Billy death scene, he stands right where Michael does and holds the club over me. Except that I catch the club as he swings. We did several different angles of this. One where I actually catch the club itself as he swings. Another that just has my hand stationary with the club in it. And finally, one where I’m holding the weapon in my hand and slowly look up to match the gaze of Geoff’s character. Nice. Marie yells that Michael’s alive before Jenny answers that she doesn’t think that that’s Michael anymore (or maybe it was the other way around… *shrugs*).

With both of us still holding the club, I pull it towards myself off-balancing Dominick. Taking the implement from him then fully, I sweep him with it, sending him to the deck. Zombie Michael then jumps onto Geoff’s character, punches him in the face once, and promptly pulls his head off.
Wait. “Pulls his head off?” Yep. Wells had gone out and purchased a fake head, and Sara and he did the best they could to make it look like it could be a model for both Geoff’s and her (Sara’s) actual heads. Perfectly enough, both Geoff and Sara have basically the exact same hair color, so that was awesome money. And even MORE perfectly, the head itself is basically a dead ringer for Sara. Like it's pretty much the exact same thing. Eerily so even. It's ridonkulous. And awesome.This scene definitely sucked for Geoff, though, as Adam wanted to get a shot of some blood dripping out of the fake head, so Sara put some of the fake concoction (at this point we were pretty much out of the legit stuff he’d bought earlier, so were using corn syrup that had been mixed with food coloring and maybe something else) in the little hole at the base of the neck. The mixture dribbled down onto the poor guy’s face and neck while we did the shooting, which he basically said was horribly uncomfortable and gross feeling. I later found out how right he was with this in terms of wearing that shiz.Speaking of this, now’s as good a time as any to mention how much it friggin’ blows to put makeup on. I had to get a lot of eyeliner (or maybe it was eye shadow – meh) put on for my scenes as a zombie, and let me tell you something: it sucks. I have no idea why girls do that crap. One, it’s unpleasant as Smurf, and two, it doesn’t even look good. Like if anything, it oftentimes makes you look worse. Ugh, I don’t get it. Don’t do it. There, I said it. Heck, don’t even wear makeup in general. And if you do, be darn careful not to go overboard. I’m reminded of that scene in Full House where DJ puts on a ton of it after Becky and Vicky tell her that no matter how bad you look, your boyfriend will always say you look great. So to prove this, they deck her out in gobs of the crap. At the same time, Danny, Jessie, and Joey are telling Steve that no matter how bad your girlfriend looks, you have to say that she’s beautiful. Eventually, DJ and Steve start talking, and at first Steve follows the guys’ advice (thereby proving the girls right) before finally cracking and saying that her face “looks like a parrot exploded.” Such a fantastic line and scene. But it’s all too true sometimes. So yeah, just throwing that out there. *end rant*But back to the zombies, after Michael finishes off Dominick, he gets up and turns to Jenny (who’s holding the bat) and Marie. Mara’s character runs to the door as Sara’s remarks about how screwed they are. And what was probably my favorite choreographed fight part of the movie (Sara and I had actually set this one up a couple days prior, and we thought that it was ridiculously soldi en banc). She swings the bat at me, I duck underneath in, and as she spins due to her momentum I grab the weapon from her, spin myself and swing at her head. It all looks waaaaay awesome. AND we throw in the fake head as well just to top everything off as the idea is that I hit a dinger with her dome and off it comes.

So with that, we had to get a shot of the rolling cabeza. To do this, Sara basically just threw the head bowling ball style toward the feet of Marie as she stood by the door. It only took two takes to get it perfect as it landed face up right next Mara’s character. Phenomenal. After that, she bolts out the door down the adjacent hallway as Zombie Michael drops the bat and slowly walks after her.

Here, we drop into the second of the three hand-held shots as we get the only point of view one in the movie (almost Cloverfield-esque). Marie yells and freaks out against the locked door at the end of said hallway as we get Michael’s view of the whole thing. He makes his way up to her and eventually stops briefly and looks at her. “Michael?” asks Marie. “I knew there was still some of you in there.” My character’s head tilts to the side before he reaches out to her. But instead of doing something nice and cute-like, he grabs her head and slams it against the door.Thankfully, she never actually hit her head against it as we mimicked the sound it would’ve made by my smacking it with my partially closed hand/fist. She then slumps to the ground in a heap. The next shot called for Michael to drag her down the hallway back to the lounge, but here we definitely had an issue. She was wearing a short skirt, and Adam wanted a view that would’ve been less-than-appropriate. So we dealt with that mess for a bit before Mara ended up crossing her legs, and Wells was able to get an angle that wasn’t horrible wrong. Crisis averted. AND she didn’t sustain any sort of injuries ala Adam from being hauled along the ground. Solid.

The final group shot for the day (and the movie) called for everyone to be back in the lounge again. Jenny, Marie, and Dominick all lay on the ground in a pile while Michael sits on the couch looking over his prizes. At this time, I’m fully blasted out in the eye-liner (we had to do three sessions of that, as it was necessary for it to get darker as I became more and more zombified) and fake blood. We even went as far as to completely cover my mouth in that red stuff to the point that I couldn’t even open it for a while for fear of drinking it and the like before it dried a bit.

But yeah, Adam had actually purchased a fake hand and fake finger as well for this scene. As I’m looking over everyone on the ground, I reach down and pull the hand from the pile of bodies. Snapping off the finger, I discard the mano and go to town on the digit. I made the best mock eating noises I could as I went over that finger, but there’s no way that it couldn’t sound at least somewhat similar to just sloppily making out with it. *shrugs* Do what you do, I guess.But alas, after finishing this scene, Adam looked at all of us and said, “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to say this, but that’s a wrap!" We all celebrated our awesomeness as we put Adam’s filming gear away and headed off to our families (well, not really, but you know what I mean) to call it a fantastic and epic night (as it was about 1:30 by then, so we’d been rocking it for around 7 ½ hours). Legit.

So that was basically it. Not going to lie, I was a little sad about that. The whole thing had been so much fun to do, but it had to come to an end eventually. And on the plus side, I’d missed three prayer pods for this and two Bible studies, so it was going to be darn fine to get back to those things. Fo sho.

Of course, I still had to do up the sunrise scene one morning. Adam and I talked and ultimately decided to rock it on 5/5/09 (Tuesday) at 6:00 in the AM. Early. But sunrise was at like 5:56 or so, so we didn’t really have a choice. So I woke up that morning at 5:05, so I’d have a chance to eat, shave, shower, and download the brownload before heading over to Sanford for the festivities. T’was about 5:51 when I received a call from a really groggy Wells telling me to go back to bed as it was raining out. I wandered over to a window and looked outside dejectedly. Dang. Truth. We settled on the coming Thursday to make it happen instead. At that point, I hung up the phone and dropped myself back into bed for another bit of time.I awoke at 5:05 to the horrid sound of my alarm clock on 5/7/09 and instantly looked outside. T’was too dark to really tell what was going on, but it certainly wasn’t raining, and it didn’t appear to cloudy. Friggin’ good. So I stumbled off to the bathroom do my bidness and get everything on lock. At 5:52 my phone ring. I looked at the display and saw that it was Adam. Oh crap, not again. I answered in my usual way when he calls, “Adam Wells!” “You ready to do this?” he responded. Fantastic. I rolled out of my house and walked off to Sanford.

I got over there a couple minutes later to see what appeared to be a really tired Adam sitting on one of the chairs in the lobby. After he let me in, we talked briefly before wandering outside to do it up. Unfortunately, it was readily apparent that we weren’t going to be able to get a good sunrise shot as a bunch of trees and buildings were blocking the sol. Dah. We walked relatively aimlessly around Sanford looking for a solid area to shoot from before finally settling on the spot behind the construction. Instead of walking into the sunrise as was originally planned, I ended up walking off toward the 10th Avenue bridge located a couple of blocks away. Good enough for a town this size. Actually, Adam had remarked that he was always confused as to why you could never see any cars in zombie apocalypse movies. Wouldn’t it make sense to see a bunch of vehicles full of people just fleeing and such? So it made sense to him that there were cars in this shot. So there you go with that.

My part was now officially done. Not Mara’s, though. Adam told me that he was surprised that I actually finished before her, as apparently they needed to re-shoot her phone conversation as the audio hadn’t turned out at all. They were going to do that this day; he asked me if I wanted to hold the boom for it, but sadly I had class all day, so I couldn’t make it work. But after that, shooting was going to be straight done. Wells already had a rough-ish copy of the movie put together, but it apparently didn’t transfer well visually from the camera to his computer, so he still had a lot of work to do as well (wow, variations of “well” appear three times in that sentence, weird). He said that it looked like “someone’s cousin shot it.” So yeah, sounded like the cat had some work to do. Not me anymore, though. The whole thing we’d just done didn’t take too long to shoot, and I was back at 1018 within like 30 minutes or so, which thankfully gave me a bit more time to sleep before I had to go to class.I actually ran into Mara that day while I was eating lunch at Middlebrook with the always cool Mike Mui. She basically dropped the same knowledge on me that Adam did about her having to re-shoot that day. She didn’t seem to mind it too much, though. Something that needed to be done. Oddly enough, a couple of days later (5/9/09), I randomly saw her again. Geoff and I had just signed our lease for next year and were walking back to campus when we ran into her and her boyfriend. We talked briefly, and she told us that the premier night for all the movies for the people in Wells’ class was going to be this coming Wednesday (she knew this because she was in a couple other films, and one of her other directors had told her). Money! Not going to lie, I was pretty friggin’ psyched to see it. No hay ninguna duda, hijo.

I spent the next few days just rocking my finals, papers, proposals, and other crap while anxiously waiting for Wednesday to come. Finally, the day arrived, and I was in the process of shooting Geoff a text message about the night when he called me. Coincidence? Or are we just the same person? Maybe… Anyways, he told me that he wasn’t going to be able to make it that night as his parents were coming up at that time to help him move out of his apartment. Sadsies.
Oddly enough, about 3 minutes after I got off the phone with him as I continued on my path to wherever it was that I was going, I ran into Phil, the original guy who was to play Dominick. We didn’t stop and talk or anything, but just exchanged a quick “hey” as we passed. Nice guy, but not going to lie, I was pretty happy that Geoff ended up being in the movie instead. I think this just worked better. About four minutes after this, I ran into Sara as well. Craziness. Zombie peeps everywhere. We traded thoughts in relation to our both being excited for the night’s awesomeness and went on our merry ways as well. Good gravy, it was going to go down. Yeah, now what?! That’s a quote from Jax in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. What? Yeah, I don't know; just felt like it was the right time for it… or something.After getting back from this little trip that I’d had to wherever, I finished up the last thing that I had to do for the semester: a cake paper for Human Resources. It only had to be 3-5 pages, double spaced. So it took me about an hour to write (HR is SUCH a cake class). I emailed that hummer in, and I was done, son! Somehow a zombie movie seemed like the perfect way to celebrate the end of the year.

The premier night was scheduled to start at 6:00 with our movie going on at 6:30. Rather than just showing up to watch Dorm of the Dead, I decided that heck, I wanted to watch them all. So I busted out of 1018 with two of my housemates in Paulie (who had helped the first night of shooting) and Finley. We got there (Nicholson Hall) at about 5:56 and found ourselves to be basically alone as there were only a couple other peeps there. Heck, Wells and the other producers weren’t there yet either. We quickly found out, though, that there was actually a final scheduled for that room at that time. Interesting.

People started to show up, though, in short order as we combated this problem. We eventually ended up heading to another room before being told to go back to the original one. Not entirely sure how it all went down, but we ended up rocking it in the first room *shrugs* So definitely we were running a bit late in terms of time at this point, but whatevs, I was done, so I didn’t care. We all sat through the first two movies as we waited for Dorm of the Dead to start. Honestly, they were pretty decent. And heck, as long as I’m at, most of the 15 total films were pretty good. A couple of them were a little off and seemed a bit slow in terms of pacing, but for the most part, they were all legit. But heck, we’re here to talk about zombies, so let’s get back on that, mis amigos.

I found myself sitting next to Wells as the movie started. No voy a mentir, we were both freaking out. The movie opened with the expository shot of Michael’s room as he sat reading “How Then Shall We Live?” Everything seemed solid. My character’s head snapped up to the door of the room as he heard the scratching noise at it. At this point, some music dropped as “Dorm of the Dead” flashed on screen written in blood-red letters. Holy crap! Like my computer currently is, it was on (weak analogy for the win!)!The shot went back to Michael as he opened the door and was instantly blitzed by the Football Zombie. I fended him off and threw my legs up to his neck for the triangle choke. A sweet, dubbed in breaking noise echoed as I snapped it. Money in the bank! Everyone in the room freaked out at that point, and I knew that everything was going to sweetness.

The rest of the movie didn’t disappoint at all. There were a couple of things cut out that were notable to me [the scene before Dominick, Marie, and I enter Jenny’s room (where I snap at Geoff’s character for stating how easy the zombies were to kill – makes my line in the lounge seem a bit off without it, but whatevs, it still works) and the shot of Zombie Megan twitching, and unfortunately for Geoff, the shot of the blood dripping down onto him], but after seeing the other films, I definitely knew what Adam meant about being concerned with the pacing. Our movie was just as long as the vast majority of the others (about 14 minutes), but ours seemed much shorter as it just flowed really well, and there were no lulls in the action. So good call to him on that one. But anyways, there’s no real point in going over exactly how the movie rolled, because… well… I already explained all of the scenes to it… and this thing is already 20 plus single spaced pages. That’s longer than a lot of people’s senior papers, so this thing is already absurd and mad-props to anyone if you’ve made it this far in the reading. Epic. Just throw in some sweet editing and awesome bone breaking sound effects, and you’ll get the idea of the finished product. Phenomenal. And most importantly, everyone there seemed to love it. Err'body laughed, cringed, and cheered throughout it's entirety. Like, we should've passed out spoons before the movie started just to make it easier for the peeps to eat it up.But that wasn’t the end of it, though. We still had to film the DVD commentary. So the next day (5/14/09) we all got together to finish it off for good. Unfortunately, Mara couldn’t make it as she was leaving that day for home, but Adam, Sara, Geoff, and I all made it. T’was especially fun since Geoff hadn’t seen it before; thus we got all of his first reactions recorded. Nice. No doubt this was a lot of fun. We ended up talking well past the film actually ended, so that was cool too. So people are just going to be watching a black screen for the last five or so minutes while we continue to ramble… unless Wells takes my advice and throws up some pictures of some bunnies instead of just blankness :-)

Alas, though, that’s the end of the zombie epic-ness. I’m sitting her in my living room at home right now waiting for Wells to finish making the DVD’s and get them sent out to us. On top of the film by itself and also with our commentary, he was planning to do a director’s commentary and HOPEFULLY a blooper reel as well. So he definitely has/had some stuff to rock, but I’m REALLY hoping that he gets that out soon because I’m jacked to see it again. Because let’s be honest here. It’s a zombie movie. And who doesn’t love zombie movies? Communists. That’s who. And I’m not communist. I’m a zombie-loving American. ZOMBIES!!!

WHOA! Pre-posting update, kiddies! I got home from an epic night of poker yesterday to find a facebook message from a certain Mr. Adam Wells telling us that the DVD's were to come soon AND that he got the movie online! HECK FRIGGIN' YEAH!!!!!! As such, I watched it four times before I went to bed last night (yeah, I kid you not), and I've since watched it again today. I love it that much, brohammers! Fantastic. Y'all NEED to check it out here: http://blip.tv/file/2179414

But a'ight. That's basically what I got for you. One last thing, though, special thanks and straight-mad-gangsta-dope props to the awesome Sara for letting me use her pics for this post!