Zombie Pitch (2004) - This was the first of several collaborations with Christopher Flanagan and Ted Chang on video projects for a class. Though a lot of input came from Chris and Ted, most of the direction of these projects came from me. However, I was very nervous about taking credit for video work on many of these videos, as I didn't want to seem like I was taking credit for the work of others, and I wasn't sure exaclty what a director's job was exactly. The original Dawn of the Dead is probably my favorite horror film, and the inspiration for this video came from that film. Ted was a huge fan also, and I know that Chris was a fan of the genre. We made this video several months before seeing Shaun of the Dead, another case where we were thinking about the same sort of material that would soon enter the public sphere. The makeup was created by using black and white tempora paint and strips of masking tape. A base layer of shades of grey was laid down in the pain. Then strips of the masking tape hanging off the face were applied and painted over, to simulated peeling rotting flesh. The paint itself cracked when dry, giving it a good texture. The only problem is that it is completely water soluble, so a zombie couldn't sweat while wearing it or it would run off. All three of us appeared in the video. I appeared twice, as the zombie, and then as the enthusiastic pitch man at the end of the video. Chris played the zombie's roommate, and Ted the man in the suit who is taking the pitch. Interestingly enough, the final scene in the video was shot right after the audition for Brian Murphy's Pizza Girl in the same room that he used to audition people. Chris Flanagan got a significant role in Pizza Girl, and I think we all tried out. The two men in the elevator are Tyler Graf and Ollie Ruff, who were writers at the time for the campus conservative magazine, The Oregon Commentator. We had gone to The Commentator office to see if my friend Tim would like to appear briefly in the video, but he was gone for the day and they agreed to be in it. Tim does appear in several videos, and talks about how he can't work drunk unlike his Commentator cohorts Pete and Brett on Real Life Adventures 30 (while very liberal myself, the Commentator staff were a wild bunch and fun people to hang out with) and also in Escape into Darkness in which he is eaten by a zombie in a graveyard (once again played by yours truly). In the scene that I like to think of as the zombie's lunch break, where the zombie sits on a bent reading a book, the book he is reading is the first volume of Marcel Proust's extensive novel, In Search of Lost Time, Swann's Way. It seemed suitable to have a zombie reading a book whose overarching title is sometimes translated as "Remembrance of Things Past."
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