"Z.A.S.A." - Director's Notes

"What would you do if faced with the undead?  Where would you go?  How would you survive? What if it happened right at this very moment?  Does your plan take that into account?  

Are you ready for the apocalypse?

We here at Z.A.S.A., the Zombie Apocalypse Survival Academy, believe that with the proper training you can be!"

Watch the commercial and find out how you can survive!

Other ZASA videos:
Zombie Simulation: Alone and Uncut
I'm a Zombie!

Director's Notes:  A Full Ensemble of New Faces

I had been sitting on Z.A.S.A. for almost a year before we started production on it.  The idea came to me in the bleak, dark hours of night while I was working the overnight shift for the holiday season.  I worked alone, and during the few times I felt lucid I let my creative mind wander.

The idea stemmed from two places.  To begin with, there is a video game called "Ratchet and Clank."  It's a cartoony, sci-fi game where you travel the galaxy as a furry bipedal mammal with a backpack-size robot companion.  Every time you arrive on a new world there is a cut-scene.  For one such place - a questionable weapons development facility - it was an infomercial geared at recruiting people for their technical college.  It was absurd, with a lot of subtle, malicious undertones.  I loved it!  When I dreamt up a zombie survival college, that video became my starting point.

At the same time, my wife and I were binge watching Lost.  Combine the ominous tone and vibe of the Dogma Initiative training videos with the aforementioned infomercial and you have Z.A.S.A.

When we wrapped on the Half Orc Encounter in August 2013, and fall was right around the corner, I knew if there were any movies I really wanted made, it had to be now.  Our filming season was almost over.  It was always the plan to take a hiatus for the holiday season.  At the same time, I had some other projects I wanted to devote some time to.  Quite frankly, there isn't enough time in a day, a week, a month even, to do it all at the same time.

So, we filmed Ninja Gaiden in September, and lined up ZASA for October.  Those were my bucket list movies.  Z.A.S.A would make a perfect flick for Halloween, and a perfect way to close up shop on STS for the foreseeable future.

The biggest challenge and biggest fun with this movie was the casting.  A part of the reason I stayed away from ZASA for so long was the size of the cast.  I needed a full ensemble of professors, students, and zombies.  Ultimately, we had everyone double up as a zombie.  The masks created enough anonymity that it looked like we had double the cast we actually did.

To do such a big production, I needed more people.  This time around, my go-to actor pool wouldn't be enough, nor my soliciting of the same noncommittal friends who expressed an interest but ultimately declined.  I wanted and needed new faces.  All in all, I say roughly half of the ZASA cast are people I had never met before.  Yet, they were all friends of different cast members, so the environment was jovial and relaxed.  The spokesman, for example,  had to be someone we'd never really seen before, if at all.  Through one of my actors I found a guy who does voice work for a living.

For ZASA I also wanted to give more screen time to people who didn't always get it.   My buddy Tommy deserved to have more screen time for sure.  Tommy has (including ZASA) been in four of my movies, and has played seven different roles.  However, it wasn't until we gave him a frying pan to fend off zombies that we ever got to see his face.  Then there's Charlie, who outside of the Waterpark!!! video had not been in a video in almost a year. 

All the academic shots were done at an actual college, of course.  Everything else was shot in my favorite place to film.  One of STS's friends lives in an amazing complex.  We've shot multiple films there.  My understanding is that it use to be an old train depot.  Now it's an apartment complex full of artist lofts.  There's so much history in the architecture that different sections of the building look like entirely different locales.

Filming the chase sequence in the basement was a new experience for me.  It was a bit nerve-wrecking actually.  Having the lights killed late at night, directing Erica to run terrified through the building while masked actors stood in the shadows, was intense.  The final product looked so much more professional (especially with the music layered over it) than I anticipated that I went back and recut the entire film into as much of a horror film as I could pull off with the footage we had.  It's really cool that I got two separate movies out of one production that way.  Check it out if you have time.  It's called "Zombie Simulation: Alone and Uncut."

Speaking of killing the lights, it's rather entertaining to watch Erica ride piggyback on Rich's shoulders to unscrew light bulbs, or to have people jump up to reach them because we couldn't find the light switches that controlled them all.

Along with ZASA and the Zombie Simulation, I also tried to put out a short video called "I'm a Zombie."  It's 18 seconds.  I think it's hilarious, but the internet found no interest in it.  We put it up around the time that the 6-second Vine videos were popular.  There was a hope in my mind that it would go semi-viral.  By that I mean viral for STS.  Like 1000 views or something.  I wanted to see how much video performance was linked to video length.  It's essentially a super-short blooper reel, and it pretty much flopped.

Of all the characters to bump into while filming, we ran into these little guys!