Greetings fellow horror movie buffs and curious readers who want to see this project fail! Welcome to the first production diary for our upcoming zombie movie “Kania na yalo bula”. The previous post felt like a production diary section too, so I’ll name the previous post production diary 0.5. Not that you care. But as they say, God is in the details. Or in this case, the zombies. The…details. Not the zombies with God. That’s just too weird.

Script v2.0

The script has been progressing nicely, with refinement suggestions from several members of the Script Approval Council (big fancy name for our circle of friends). Initially there was a driving sequence in the beginning, but that idea was scrapped due to (a) main boy Albert not having a legal driving license and (b) not having enough time to fit in the car into the current storyline. “How were you going to do the driving part if Albert can’t drive?” was the general question being asked, to which I nonchalantly replied, “Psh. Greenscreen fixes all.” I would have added ‘except the failure to act’, but its abit too early in the production cycle to break a few spirits, so I’ll let this one slide.

/evil laughter

Fresh Meat to the Meat Grinder

As this movie production grows, so does the number of people needed to look after other aspects of movie making deemed too dangerous to attempt by either the Director or myself. Here are few more of the new unfortunates:

Feroz: Super technicality man/camera man/if we don’t have the equipment, he’ll probably have it guy/bad ass at COD guy

Dane: Test footage stand in/unwilling zombie extra/token white guy

Dani: main boy’s unfortunate girlfriend/make up artist/all round screamer

Willaine: Wardrobe stylist/awesome Cookie baker

Access Granted

Our movie has two locations in its shotgun sights, namely the Bilo Gun Battery about 5km or so outside of the Suva City, and Michael’s house, specifically his room. The Bilo Gun Battery is quite the fascinating site, with abandoned buildings, creepy dark tunnels, and deep trenches overgrown with bush.

A pity the actual guns the whole area was built for were removed. I had in my mind the grand finale where the main boy, surrounded by hordes of undead zombies, would somehow, in a flash of macgyver brilliance, manage to get the huge cannon working; Screaming and swearing in fijian, he’d violently taunt the zombies to ‘come and get some’ while he blasted them away, but then he’d eventually be overwhelmed by the numerous zombies. As he disappears beneath the frantic swirl of bodies, one hand still remains in the air, its hand defiantly held in a thumbs up pose.

Since the WW2 area is now a much hallowed Heritage site, in order to obtain permission to shoot there we needed to approach the Fiji museum. I was dreading a charging fee of some sort, or at the most, a flat out denial, but the people there were surprisingly happy to allow us to run around screaming and bleeding on their heritage site. Of course, we will be super careful. Think of it as a carefully controlled screaming and bleeding affair. With a camera. And hopefully lunch.

A big thanks to the Director of the Fiji Museum, Ms Sagale Buadromo, for allowing us access to shoot at the site.

Moody footage, moody music, moody test shots

Today Lawrence, Albert and Dane went to the Bilo Battery Site to scout the area and get some ideas and locations on how the movie would operate on the premises. While they snooped around, Lawrence, armed with Dane’s trusty mobile phone camera, took a few test shots to help decide on camera angles etc. Albert and Dane, being the usual suspects, were served the nigh impossible task of trekking through the silent, creepy buildings and dark, damp tunnels and trenches while Lawrence happily filmed away. It was a hard job to look purposefully, yet at the same time have a hint of curiosity mixed with slight apprehension while maintaining a certain aloofness above the whole affair. Yes, quite the difficult job indeed.

Here is the test footage of the afternoon trek, complete with said moody music to set the scene.

Ladies & Gentlemen, I give you – n00b Productions

All movies had some sort of production house behind it, and this movie will be no different. Spawned from aimless evenings around the grog bowl/beer carton, n00b Productions isn’t actually a registered thingimajigi, but a rather curious attempt to see just how many people actually get what the word means. Regardless of the fact that we actually are, all noobs with this movie being our first attempt at Hollywood millions, we felt that this movie needed a proper ‘movie house’ logo intro to let the audience know that this movie was going to be of the upmost quality. None of this painfully superimposed Arial white fonts with black outlines floating in the middle of the screen announcing the amateur standards yet to come. No. As Marilyn Manson says, “This is the real shit.”