By Dylan Bradley/editor-in-chief
Current and former TCC students won first place, audience favorite and best zombie FX awards in the Spread the Dead 48-hour zombie film competition Sept. 5-7.
A four-minute, 50-second film called The Collectors was created from start to finish by a team of 30 people. Each team that competed was assigned a random genre, one specific line of dialogue, prop and character that had to be used in the film.
“The character we had was Ripper Roxy Van Horn, and they were a collector,” film producer Faith Perry said. “We made them the most badass characters of the whole video. We made them zombie hunters, so they’re the collectors.”
The line of dialogue each team had to incorporate was “Just wait. I promise you won’t be disappointed.”
Screenwriter Alexa Katchinska said they worked the line into the beginning when a zombie son is asking his zombie mother to tell him a story.
“We decided to take the perspective from the zombie’s point of view instead of the human’s point of view,” Katchinska said.
Director Zeke Arredondo said he worked closely with the director of photography to make sure the scenes and actors look and feel how he wanted.
“Everything that could go wrong, went wrong,” makeup artist and RTVF student Megan Bell said.
Aside from the time constraint of finishing the film in 48 hours, the cameraman began the competition in the emergency room with a bad back, lodging issues arose, rain threatened to end the filming portion early and warm humidity caused makeup problems.
Bell stayed up for 39 hours straight.
“We were probably doing makeup until 10 a.m.,” she said. “Then in between that and while they were shooting, we were also putting makeup on other people. It’s insane how long it takes.”
The group said that pre-production work was what really saved them. Arranging for equipment, making sure friends could act as zombies and then having everyone showing up when they were needed made them the winning team.
