So, as a Thursday just rolled over, episode 3 has been released.
It’s great to get such interesting feedback from people, and it’s also a great feeling to know that we’re now done shooting & editing the remaining episodes - and that for the next four weeks, a new episode will be up every Thursday. Ongoing content is, in a lot of ways, much more satisfying than a feature.
Which brings me to this - I’ve decided that, rather than just write another article on the science (for lack of a better word) of producing content on an indie budget I’d write a little bit about just what the idea was when going into Sharehouse Zombie Apocalypse, what I was trying to achieve from a story and style point of view, what the inspirations are, what’s yet to come, and what I think we’re succeeding and failing at. (This may be a long post - and to be clear, there won’t be any spoilers beyond episode 3)
Sharehouse Zombie Apocalypse began as a short film script, the details of which I won’t go into here as it’ll spoil the events that take place later in the season. The idea was to try and make Zombies as mundane as possible, and in doing so make the reaction people have to them all the more ridiculous and insane. Every time I’d seen Zombies done, they were taken awfully seriously, I thought, given how absurd the concept is.
So the basis can be summarised as this: What if a Zombie apocalypse happened, but the actual zombies were so horribly ineffectual that the biggest problems included such things as the legality of corpse desecration? Is it “okay” to begin looting and shoplifting after an Apocalypse so horribly weak that half the shops actually remain open? This was never going to be even a little bit serious. In reality, even the “Zombies” aspect was played down a great deal in the original script. I think only one Zombie was ever seen at all, in fact. For the series we decided to play up the Zombie angle a bit more, and have a few of them milling about the area, just to accentuate how amazingly useless they were.
For example, there’s a Zombie seen very briefly in episode 1 who has managed to get himself wedged on a sharp bit of fence out the front of the sharehouse. After growling once and scaring Skyler (who wasn’t expecting him there) he doesn’t come into it much from then on - I mean, if he’s wedged in such a way that he can’t do more than make the odd bit of noise, there’s no harm in leaving him there, right? Well, at least until the smell gets too much to handle for the housemates.
So really, the setting exists solely to provide a way for four characters (five, later on) to engage in discussions about the moral and practical aspects of living with other people (as George Romero says - there’s no kind of human story that can’t be told with zombies).
The best way to do this was to create characters with distinct and almost high-concept flaws. Skyler’s is narcissism, Mole’s is pride, Clay is a sociopath and Portlock is just too darn self-consciousness. It’s not too hard, from there, to start imagining fucked up situations for the bunch of them to get into when left to their own devices during a Zombie Apocalypse.
Of course, while as anyone who’s seen Insecurity or Dead Man Drinking (or any of my short films) will attest to… I do loves me some dialogue, often to the complete exclusion (or, depending on your opinion, to the detriment) of action, but, y’know, that’s the kind of thing I like watching. As I’ve said numerous times before, I get bored watching action scenes, so I don’t tend to write them.
However, a scenario like SZA is worth a lot more than just a one-room play. So many situations came out of the idea, either right from the first few meetings about the project or in discussions with actors during filming. In fact, over the course of filming season one (which was shot in one big block that took about 2 months worth of weekends to film) whether from conversations had on set, or between weekends on the phone, we’d basically extrapolated, from season one and the ideas I’d already had, precisely where to go with season two. In fact, we had so much fun shooting the first season, and figuring out where to go with season two that we’d kinda already decided that we’d film the next season, regardless of whether people liked the first one or not.
I guess there are two kinds of ‘inspirations’ that I can talk about with SZA. There’s direct inspirations - what drove me to make it, and others to get involved… and tonal inspirations - what’s helped inspire the style of the narrative.
The first one’s actually pretty simple. We’d done a few feature films and a bunch of shorts that really fit in the drama or comedy categories, and learnt a few things from those experiences. The important ones were:
- People generally don’t like watching long things.
- Without a hook that tells people they’re going to like it, people won’t watch it.
The first item made us decide that, much as we love making low-budget features, something short and episodic was a better idea if our goal was to get people watching what we do.
The second item comes down to genre. When we made Insecurity, the ’selling point’ was that it was a hacker movie. Those are not just rare, but also rarely done well. That being the case, a lot of the people who watched it saw it solely because of the obscure subject-matter. Which isn’t to say a lot of people watched it - just that when they did, that was often the reason.
With Dead Man Drinking, the simple fact is that, love it, hate it, or don’t feel strongly one way or another - it was a dramedy. Its concept was simple enough to explain in a few words, but there’s not a great deal going for it beyond that. It had no actors people would recognise and no filmmaker whose name people would care about.
“Do a horror movie,” I was told, by a few people. ”Everybody loves a horror movie, and it seems to be the one type of film that people will tolerate from Australia.”
I don’t really like horror. It’s just never interested me. And yet when I write comedy, it tends to be dark rather than, y’know… fluffy. So when I brought up the zombie script idea… it began to fall into place.
A chance to write dark comedy, use and play around some of the traditions of a well-established genre that just might interest some folks… and the perfect way to make something interesting out of what amounts to a one-room-play for much of the first season.
As for the second kind of ‘inspiration’… well, it’s character comedy, as most things I write tend to be. So if you want a list of things that I drew inspiration from when writing… sometimes it’s the surrealism of Black Books, sometimes the ‘comedy of incompetence’ that Dad’s Army did so well and sometimes awkward style that Gervais & Merchant or the Arrested Development guys have turned into an institution in itself.
Once we began planning the shoot, one of the first things we had to pick was a visual style. (Well, not the first thing, but it’s pretty boring talking about deciding just where to shoot) Choosing a sort of desaturated, dingy, grainy, harsh-lighting style was kind of a no-brainer. (Hah! See what I did there?) Not so much to artificially make it look ‘old’ as to accentuate the scungy life of sharehouse / post-apocalyptic living.
This kind of lighting is always fun to implement. We went for an almost film-noir style, with top-down and very extreme lighting designed to just show up the faces - if that. In some cases we did nothing but silhouettes. Of course, it helped that the shooting location actually WAS lit with top-down lights, so it didn’t seem too out of place to have everything lit that way.
In terms of what we failed at, this is occasionally one that leaps out at me. Put SZA on a projector or a big-screen TV, and I think it looks pretty good. Put it on mobile devices or youtube (our target platforms… *cough, cough*) and you can’t guarantee that either the lighting in the viewing area OR the background lighting on the display medium are going to be even vaguely reasonable. We certainly had more than a few comments on the darkness of certain shots - and the worst part is that some of the shots that get singled out are the ones I like the best… in a controlled environment.
We’d come out of doing two indie features, so suddenly having to fight the Evil Elder Gods of Youtube was a bit of a shock.
Pacing was the next question. Not a huge one when filming (as pacing is really forged in the edit) but it’s still a factor. Shoot a scene, however short, in just a single shot, and you’re stuck with the pacing you worked on with the actors. If you shoot more traditionally, with two-shots and close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots, and you open yourself up to a lot more options in terms of speed, but you still need to know what you’re doing when you shoot.
SZA was written to have a lot of rapid-fire discussion. Whether it’s about toilet paper, the ethics of beating up dead bodies, or who’s going to have to go take care of a zombie that’s made it as far as the back yard, the people who populate SZA have more in common with Aaron Sorkin characters than David Lynch ones.
Almost all of the dialogue scenes in SZA were, therefore, shot with little wide coverage. Where required, a few two-shots and wides were grabbed, but usually just to glue things together where required. Using closeups and cut-aways, the scenes worked much better with almost all the air taken out of the discussions.
It does, however, mean that the pages-of-script-to-minutes-of-final-product ratio changes quite a bit. The longest of our episodes, for example, comes in at a little under 9 minutes, and was 15 pages of written script. But then, we’re kinda used to this - Dead Man Drinking was the same. 113 pages to 90 minutes.
As a final comment - doing something that’s short and episodic means that you get a chance to experiment in a way that can often be dangerous in a film. If you’re trying to hold someone’s interest for 90 minutes, especially if money’s been thrown into the project, you probably don’t want to spend, say, 15 minutes of that time in a bizarre dream sequence that’s purely an indulgence for both yourself and your cinematographer. (No, we didn’t do that in SZA - it’s just a random example)
And so we did get a chance, with SZA, to make a few episodes that try different things. From rapid-fire dialogue episodes to awkward juxtaposition sequences to weird confrontations to comedic montages… it’s been a great experiment.
With a major TV series, directors work on anywhere from a few episodes a season, to just a single episode. In some series, this means that you get the odd episode that just ‘tries something different’, either in tone or in execution.
While the entire first season of SZA was directed by myself and Kurtis, we sometimes allowed ourselves some freedom and made like it wasn’t - if only to try something different.
It can be a little dangerous trying that sort of thing - it’s easy to go too far out of the established storytelling style of a series and find viewers screaming that you’ve jumped the shark… but regardless of the outcome, it was worth it.
Anything’s worth trying once.
Well, except possibly Russian Roulette.
We’ve had a great time making Sharehouse Zombie Apocalypse… and we can’t wait to get back to it.
