TOPIC:

Here is the official trailer for Spring Break Zombie Massacre, premiering July 7th:

The feature and trailer were edited exclusively on FCPX. The eventual feature-length documentary, Sam & Mattie Make A Zombie Movie, is also being cut in the program.

I had already been working in FCPX for a few years before this project began, but have learned a whole lot about workflows and making things translate to Davinci/ProTools/AE, etc via this site and message board. Thanks for the many assists!

O.M.G.!! Hilarious! 5 ***** out of *****

looks like If Abraham, Zucker, Zucker do a Roger Corman movie!

… would be interesting to hear a bit more about the making-of, background... this is no 'commercial' aka studio project? If so, very well, professional executed! What was the budget anyhow? Millions of unpaid volunteers I guess (who borrows a yacht for a Springbreak movie??), but let alone you needed megagallons of fake blood and mastix make up .. ..

Tell us a bit more, crew, book, amount of impro/on set creation, tech specs ....

Looks like done with great fun - what are your plans for distribution?

.........Smart title, by the way.... hits three triggers in your main target audience......

Thanks! Yeah, it was originally just a small Kickstarter project that a good friend was getting off the ground. The 3 or 4 of us that have been working on it for the last year and a half are in the business but looking for something we could own.

The budget was around $65,000 (after Kickstarter fees), but we've been given a lot of great help from companies like Panavision and JinglePunks. If we had to pay for everything we were given for little to no cost we would have been spending easily $250K. Silver Scream FX (multiple Adult Swim shows) came up from Atlanta to do all the zombie work. The last piece to fall into place for the shoot was the boat - only a couple of days before the scene was shot!

Sam & Mattie wrote the whole script, but they also improvised about 25% of the dialogue on set. Some things just worked better in the moment. The camera crew was mostly out of NY - people we've worked with on commercial/feature projects in the past and were willing to take a pay cut for a fun few weeks. We shot 16 out of 18 days during a very hot stretch of August in Providence, RI and the surrounding area. We shot 2K on the Arri Alexa with vintage Panavision glass. That was a dream.

We're starting our festival run now after a successful hometown premiere last week. The boys are even going to be on Conan this Thursday, 7/14! No wide release or distribution plans formalized yet, but we're hoping to meet some big players at festivals.

After that we'll attempt to get the making of documentary completed by end of year or early 2017.

A good write-up from this past weekend on the whole project: www.boston.com/culture/entertainment/2016/07/09/sam-and-mattie

timfo wrote:

... $65,000... Arri Alexa with vintage Panavision glass. ...

<cough> not exactly what I would call a <cough> non-commercial project!

So, a Highschool Kids movie, done by professionals.-
Gives me hope for my school projects, done with a 250$ camcorder LOL

Thanks again for sharing, and that link - lots of valueable background info such a project has.

Over here, by German standards, the 'guns'n gore'-topic will prohibit ANY positive media response, ... however, great project!

Last Qs, nature of this board:
How many days editing/post? CC done in FCPX too? v/Fx? Audio mixing?

No bones about it - we were very lucky to have some very generous people and companies help us out when they first saw our Kickstarter. A lot of people in the industry saw it as a project with a pure intent, rather than another client job they didn't care about or mindless reality show.

The film has a ~45 min runtime. I'd estimate it took about 25 days to do a first cut (including syncing and logging). We tweaked cuts for about a month after that. VFX and sound design took a long time because we kept losing potential vendors who had agreed to work for reduced fees, but then found full fee clients and bounced us down the calendar. We understood though - gotta pay the rent!

In actual work days, VFX was about 8 days, color was 3 days, and sound mix 2 days (only because I had done about 75% of sound design during my edit). CC was done in FCPX, color in DaVinci, VFX in AE and several other programs (not sure what all they used), sound in ProTools.