Undead Armageddon

Born from the frustration of my early attempts at human wrangling (aka "filmmaking"), Undead Armageddon was conceived as a "trailer for a zombie movie that doesn't exist"...that somehow blossomed into a seven-minute short film. Written, directed, narrated, edited and (mostly) shot by Yours Truly.

In any case, the shooting benefits were these: no "actors" were required (only "extras"), it didn't matter who showed up on a given day, and no live sound needed to be recorded. If no one else who could do at least passable makeup FX could make it: fuck it, do it myself. Heck: I even had days where I was the entire cast and crew! Seventy-five per cent of the shots consisted only of zombies in a variety of habitats, doin' their zombie thang. And there were plenty of wigs and whatnot on offer if someone had played a zombie before, and we needed them to be a new one.

I mean: you probably wouldn't wanna do a feature this way. But it was a wonderful change of pace after all the cast-'n'-crew - not to mention continuity! - issues of past projects. After several months of scattershot, genuinely fun shooting, I had tens of hours of footage in the can to choose from...leading to several more months of also-enjoyable editing.

Maybe I'll do something like this again one day, for the sheer pleasure of it all. The only downside: not sure I'm proud enough of the finished product to put it up on YouTube. (Some semi-explicit, if completely fake, "wanking" scenes probably wouldn't fly either! Sigh. There's always Vimeo, I guess...)

At the very least, have some stills. And in lieu of specifically remembering who was who and who did what, I think I'll just list and thank the entire cast and crew in alphabetical order, so here goes nothin':

Rose Angi (cast, make-up effects), Dave Battershell (cast), Anatoli Birmingham (cast, make-up effects), Michael Bowser (writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor, sound recording and mixing, cast, make-up effects supervisor), Josh Brown (cast), Ben Cain (cast), David Cavallo (cast), Brian Craddock (cast, make-up effects, still photography), Ralph Daniels (cast, make-up effects, still photography), Robin Fassbender (cast), Aaron Hopsick (cast, make-up effects, music w/ Brendan Murphy), Dan ("Manimal") Irish (cast), Peter Irish (cast), Raymond Lacken (cast), Martin Long (cast), Andrew Lynch (cast), Emma Lynch (cast), Jason Lynch (cast, make-up effects), Adam McCarthy (cast, make-up effects), Eleanor McLeod (cast), Chad Morbid (cast), Jean Rapkins (cast, make-up effects), Michael Rowlands (cast, make-up effects), Shawn Rowlands (cast, make-up effects, co-producer, head production assistant), Rachel Seabrook (cast, make-up effects), Jason Shea (cast), James Simonetta (still photography), Rob Waldie (cast), and Paul Williams (cast).

Furthermore, here's a "bonus" folder of "Behind the Scenes" photographs for the truly curious:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3fnkdh249bueq3d/AABTA82ux5vGJIJVYom__Kr5a?dl=0

And if you're still not sated (!), head over to https://www.instagram.com/michaelbowserau/ for some slight variants!