Sunday 26 August 2007

20 hour Saturday...

http://www.severnproject.co.uk/events_diary.html

http://www.severnproject.co.uk/press_launch.html

http://www.virtual-shropshire.co.uk/shropshire_news/severn-project.shtml

Well, it was a long old Saturday the 25th of August 2007 for me alright. After a pretty naff near-six-hours-of-kip (I'm one of those people who really needs their sleep), I was up at 6:30am to start getting my brain in gear and my camera kit loaded up, before heading off at 8:30 to arrive in Bridgnorth at around 10am, before hoofing it over to the Quayside to film the Arrival of the River Inspectors and their subsequent "walk about" performances across the town for the next 2 or 3 hours.

Then, after a long & hot wait at Severn Park (the main performance area), it finally rolled around to 8pm, at which point the main portion of the day's events kicked off, with a procession of town's folk and the crazed River Inspectors wheeling the Sturgeon on a gurney towards the field, at which point the main show kicked off. It was all a mad dash to get the filming done, very "run & gun", just grab as many shots as possible, run back and forth, avoid the water fountains that gushed out a few times, grab as many audience shots as possible, captures the performances and the fireworks and so-on.

What on earth was all this I hear you mutter at your monitor? A Shropshire Council street-art "Severn Project" called "Sturgeon Moon", relating to a breed of fish which used to live in the rivers in the area.

Finally, the performance came to an end at 10pm, with an hour of pottering about and checking the footage afterwards, I ended up getting back home at 1am, rather weary that's for sure - but not weary enough to go without watching the last 25 minutes of Back to the Future, which I spotted on ITV2+1 on the freeview box I got for my bedroom - so, off to bed at 2am.

A long day yesterday it was indeed, just a shame I didn't get a good night's kip last night either. I kept waking up for some reason, hopefully tonight I'll regain the sleep I've lost the past couple of nights, hehe.

The Zombie Diaries

Well, I just finished watching the film and might I say, jolly good show. :)

It's great to finally get a proper UK zombie film (28 Days/Weeks Later doesn't count - they're rage infected humans :p), it makes it all the more realistic for us Brits (and will hopefully provide international audiences with another viewpoint, rather than the oft-American viewpoint in the zombie genre - not that I'm bitching about that, but you know...). I think it gets to a point whereby with zombie films almost always coming from America, they lose any sense of realism because it's kind of a "default setting", if that makes any sense...but there's so few zombie films set in the UK, and especially presented in this sort of way, that it packs much more punch and terror.

TZD - a fresh location for a zombie film, a different society in which it all takes place, and the way in which you see mumblings of sh*t hitting the fan throughout before things get increasingly worse, make it a great flick.

The gore on offer is rather tasty, and leads to a some rather f*cked up scenes...the sort of scenes that when you think about the surrounding intricacies or reasonings behind the actions, it just makes it all the more messed up.

My only real gripe with the film is the delivery of some of the dialogue, at times it didn't feel as real as it could have, or I felt there were a few moments where there were gaps between different people's lines. So at times I felt the dialogue wasn't always delivered as realistically as it could have been, as in it [I]felt[/I] staged at these moments...but it's really only a minor gripe that isn't carried throughout the entire film, just on occasion.

Over all the film is great, I really enjoyed it and there's some really messed up moments or even downright scary moments, made all the more powerful due to the way it was filmed.

...

I've been through the deleted scenes, and I can understand why many of them were taken out, they felt a bit stagey. While there's content within those scenes that was good, I guess just the way the scenes came out it wouldn't have worked in the main film.

Next up I'll go and check out the making of, which I rather look forward to and then in due course, the commentaries.

I'd definitely recommend for zombie fans to pimp out the cash for a copy, it's worth it. :cool::)

Saturday 11 August 2007

First I was blogged on, now I've been IMDb'd!!

http://imdb.com/title/tt1082844/

Many thanks to Gary Ugarek (star/writer & director of Deadlands: The Rising) for putting IAZM up for getting an IMDb page, so yes indeed, Zombie Man has now extended yet further into the world of t'internet.

...

In other news, I finally started writing a new script today. I originally had the idea a year ago, and quickly got down to jotting down notes and mapping out ideas as well as charting the entire narrative in a basic form. Then, inevitably, I got distracted by other various things...the first IAZM, then Christmas and IAZM2, then working on "Contempt of Conscience", then working with the Rural Media Company on "Show and Tell" and then brainstorming/scripting IAZM3 ... but now, with a bit of free time in between projects, I decided to head back to those notes from a year ago and today I finally started scripting it. The original working title was "Holiday", but that was a really sucky title, so the new working title is "Generation Procrastination"...bit of a mouthful, but it's a better working title at least. The first scene of the first sequence is pretty much done, not necessarily that much written, but it's always hard to start writing something new, it always used to happen to me when writing essays at Uni...but once you get into the swing of things it's all cool.

The idea behind this new script? Basically to have something that I could conceivably actually film with a group of dedicated people with proper funding and support once I've gathered enough contacts, so I figured it's best to try and have a script done by then, rather than still be sitting with the idea for the script.