Making Movies

Campus Movie Fest is a national program that sponsors teams of college students to make five-minute films within a week. CMF provides a camera, computer and equipment and sets students to work on films, 16 of which are chosen for a special on-campus screening and a few of which go on to compete at the regional level. Participant Nicole Klee describes everything it took to create her team's film "Z Strain: Revealed."

I'm not sure how the topic of zombies came about. I guess because zombies are awesome they made their way into our Campus Movie Fest movie, and, of course, jointly with zombies came a documentary.

The first day of the movie fest week, a Thursday, my partner and I figured out a general plan for what we were going to film. We knew we wanted a sort of documentary/ mockumentary thing so we just talked over what types of characters we wanted to interview and the specificities of the zombification process. My partner and I met on Friday and got most of the filming done then. Most of the actors we used for our film were friends that we seemed to just find as we were shooting. It worked out pretty well.

All the questions we asked them were unscripted and I guess in some ways that really helped the feel of the documentary. The filming took most of the day Friday, and even though the final film was only five minutes, we had quite a lot of footage.

We didn't film very much on Saturday, because we just needed to get shots of the empty campus to depict the school after the affects of the disease had caused it to close. But after filming on Saturday, we began the process of editing. Our movie defiantly turned out different than I pictured it.

There was nothing difficult to learning how to use the camera, and messing around with the video on iMovie was pretty straightforward when it was on the computer.

The process went a lot smoother than I thought it would go and our video turned out zombierific.

Honestly, one of the hardest parts was thinking about putting it into a category. We knew it was a documentary but whether to put it also under comedy or drama was the question.

There were definitely some funny parts, most of which we didn't put in to the final cut, but the symptoms of the 'zawmbie' disease were much like the morning-after effects of a late party night on a college student.

I'm not sure if it's because it was unscripted that made it difficult to classify or if it was just the fact that we hadn't really tried to make it fit one genre specifically.