Planning a Zombie Attack

 

Unless you happen to be keenly interested in Northern Virginia community theater, you are probably unaware that I am a sometimes actress around here. It's fun and keeps me out of trouble. Also, I like applause. A lot. I've done some stage managing as well, which isn't quite as fun, because it's mostly like...well, you know.

This past weekend, I expanded my thespian horizons to the world of film. Specifically independent horror/comedy. I got eaten by zombies. Now, I suppose you all could give me many parallels between zombies and project managers, but that's not where I'm going with this. I was thinking of it more from the producer/director side of things, where planning can make the difference between Oscar bait and B-movie schlock...almost, anyway.

The face of my doom. He gets a lot scarier when he's hungry.

We spent the morning shooting a "beach party" scene, in which one of my fellow actors (and the other zombie meal) was wearing a lovely white cover-up. In the afternoon, we shot the zombie attack scene. As it turns out, zombie attacks can be quite messy, and by the end of the shoot, my unfortunate friend was saturated in a gloppy red mix of detergent, Karo syrup and red paint. That's when I pointed out that we needed to shoot the rest of the beach party the next morning, and--wow, that cover-up was going to be a real continuity problem...

Had the director planned the shooting schedule better, he would have shot ALL of the beach scenes before our wardrobe was ruined by stage blood...or he could have made sure that there was another identical cover-up for the later shoot...or he could have done the beach scene without the cover-up...you get the point. This lack of planning meant that we spent the evening laundering the dickens out of that poor cover-up when we could have been painting the town red...although, to be honest, we had seen more than enough red paint for one day.