Launched as a piece of zero-budget, webcam-shot fun in 2008, the series is set in the months after a worldwide zombie apocalypse, applying a healthy dose of wry British humour to the adventures of three incompetent survivors more interested in video blogging than survival techniques.
Blogging and Brains and Beans: How 3 idiots survived a Zombie Apocalypse.
Over four years it picked up hundreds of thousands of views online and a dedicated fan base including genre legends like effects guru Tom Savini, Walking Dead comics artists Charlie Adlard, SFX Magazine and zombie film directors Marc Price (Colin) and Dominic Brunt (Before Dawn).
Original creators Hannah Bungard, Tony Hipwell and Miles Watts, fresh from micro budget features Crimefighters and Whoops! that were highlighted by reviewers at Empire, Time Out and Sight & Sound, have now teamed up with producer Steve Piper at British indie mainstay Coffee Films to reboot the series in a feature length format.
“It’s been a great few years and we feel very lucky to have been able to keep progressing making films which edge the budgets and production values up every time, but it’s difficult making the jump from micro-budget tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands an adaptation needed,” comments Watts.
Enter Coffee Films, who were awarded by the European film industry as one of the most exciting emerging fiction talents in the early 2000s before embarking on seven years of critically acclaimed documentary filmmaking, most recently the half-million-dollar Killing Joke documentary The Death and Resurrection Show out this year
“I got to know Miles through a mutual friend and liked a lot of the early experimental comedy shorts he was making,” explains Piper, “when Zomblogalypse came out it was obviously a perfect evolution, a coming together of creative kindred spirits to create a very funny and entertaining world.”
The four filmmakers began developing a feature length screenplay almost a year ago, investing in development time to avoid the back-to-back-episodes feel many series adaptations fall into.
Promising to keep everything fans of the much loved web series delivered, scaled up to a true long-form storyline, the concept has already picked up interest from distributors and turned to crowd-funding to bridge the gap from screenplay to production.
“People tend to think that once you have a script financing just lands in your lap, and that can be true for the big names,” explains Piper, “but for most filmmakers you need a whole package of budget calculations, actors, key technicians and concept artwork to get to the next stage. Crowd funding has emerged as a really great way to get through that process if you don’t have twenty or thirty grand sitting around.”
Bungard continues, “It’s exciting, and a little bit humbling, that people are trusting you to make something that they’ll want to buy and be part of nearly two years in advance. So many people have supported Zomblog over the last five years, whether it’s our friends getting turned into zombies or people on the other side of the world sharing the YouTube videos; we feel very lucky they’ve stuck by us and are supporting us again making a movie version.”
The Zomblogalypse crowd funding campaign runs through April looking to raise £10,000 to meet pre-production costs, and has already pulled 15% of that within a few days of launch. Check it out yourself to reserve a DVD or fulfill a dream to be a screen zombie at http://igg.me/at/zomblogalypse/x/1907888.
Crowdfunding PR, Social Media & Marketing Campaigns 