In modern times there is a biozombie trend, when they aren't really "undead" so much as a sick human (eg I am Legend, 28 days later etc). I am not sure if it co-incides, but these biozombies seem to have enhanced reflexes, strength and hearing and speed etc... (whereas the old school ones were slow, sad things).

Personally, from a startup perspective, I'd be more inclined to go with a shambling type zombie, purely because keyframing the animation can be achieved fairly effectively with python scripts and then motions adjusted with bezier curves on an individual basis.

Doing more with less basically.

Also, stylistically I think the whole "tortoise and the hare" effect with fast protagonists and slow moving, shambling antagonists is quite amusing.

That said, I'd love to compare it to Night of the Living Dead. I'm just scared that it'll be a letdown.

That said, it's hard to sort out the good stuff from the crap when you've seen nothing.

Firstly, I'm a huge fan of the zombie apocalypse.

-So, why do I like it?

I love the genre because, by far and large, because it creates a reality that works very counter-intuitively. Sure, zombies are a threat, but bigger picture, they're just a background concern compared to the threat that other people present, and that's where the meat of good zombie apocalypse media resides: human interaction.

The scenario allows for an accelerated skewing of human interaction that extends not to just distrust of strangers, but absolute loyalty to anyone that's proven their trust. Anyone showing slight signs of mental instability is now a huge threat to your livelihood, and anyone not pulling their weight may have be killed or left for dead (which is effectively killing them yourself.) What, in our world, are the slightest of concerns, become large factors in a zombie infested world.

-Favorite zombie media? Night of the Living Dead (which is public domain and free at http://www.archive.org/details/night_of_the_living_dead http://www.archive.org/details/night_of_the_living_dead_dvd And Romero's others (Dawn, Day, Land, just not Diary.) Shaughn of the Dead, Zombi II (Shark v Zombie; how can you go wrong there? Otherwise blah) 28 Days Later (Yeah, yeah, whatever. Listen to the commentary. They know it's a zombie flick.) and the UK show Dead Set was worth watching too.

Most other zombie flicks just aren't that good.

The comic The Walking Dead is without a doubt some of the best zombie media out there (I collect it in TPBs, and need to grab the latest.)

Max Brooks' books World War Z (interview-like retelling of the Zombie War with veterans,) and Zombie Survival Guide (Almost like a 'for Dummies' book) are must-reads.

And the game Urban Dead http://www.urbandead.com is pretty fun initially as well, but didn't have a ood 'end-game' when I was playing. Now it all looks relatively safe: http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/Suburb (map)

-As for anything else I'd add...

Just that gore isn't necessarily required, but if you ARE going to do it, well, make it worthwhile. ;)

And feel free to email if you think of any follow-up questions for zombie fans.!

In fact, for two excellent types of such super-personal films that predate the modern zombie film (1968,) look at Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) and Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (1957, though he's best known for Serpico). Both include small groups of people completely reliant upon each other to make it (to a verdict, or to just survive.)

That said, I also absolutely love Robert Rodriguez and his style of "grab the camera, we're about to make a movie!"-filmmaking. I think he's able to relate his energy in a way that usually takes AAA directing (I'd categorize his style as one of 'potential' over 'polish,' but he's also capable of selling what he's doing to the viewer, two characteristics that work amazingly in tandem, at least for me.)

So, what did I think? In short, I absolutely loved it, but I didn't mention it because I don't think it fits in with what I love about zombies.

I have a hunch that people who are early adopters of things online are usually the same kind of people who are into Zombie films. The whole point of putting this onto HN (as opposed to a movie site) is that I would get intelligent discussion, with people articulating what it specifically is about these films that appeals to them (or not) - which is the exact type of data I'm seeing.

The reason I left it as a simple binary choice was so that I could gauge to what extent my hunch was correct (as a rough percentage). So far, the results are about what I expected, so I'm fairly pleased with it up until now, but I'll wait until a few days to pass final judgement.

Second, again -- you're looking at a potential audience of 0.01% (HN-reading zombie-movie-lovers) versus a large, general audience of young viewers who enjoy (and pay for) digital animation content. How does that make sense? You specifically stated that you wanted to do this as a low-cost thing -- thus you can't be making high-quality, specialized content that caters specifically to a dedicated audience of zombie-movie-lovers who would be willing to pay for it... Have you thought out your business plan here?

  First, I'll note that what you wrote here somewhat contradicts your original post

  This is an absurdly small and misleading sample, even within your stated target.

I could have, for all intensive purposes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours conducting extensive research - or I could just build the damn thing and release it for much less than what it would cost to obtain "accurate research".

  versus a large, general audience of young viewers who enjoy (and pay for) digital animation content.

   You specifically stated that you wanted to do this as a low-cost thing

  thus you can't be making high-quality, specialized content

Just because the big name companies like Pixar and Dreamworks are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at creating this kind of entertainment, doesn't mean that it is the only way.

Think about it for a second, really break it down into its component parts. Your typical animation FILM by those 2 studios is around 90 minutes of entertainment and costs upwards of 100 million dollars each. It's about on par with what Hollywood is spending on films.

Now lets look at your average tv show, 22 minutes of entertainment. So if we used the Hollywood blockbuster model, each episode should cost around $25 million plus right? No, it doesn't work that way.

Lost for example, which is notorious for being expensive to produce cost (in its first year) $44 million for 22 episodes at 43 minutes (approx) running time each.

That's an approximate 10 times the entertainment, for less than half the cost.

So if Film and TV operate at completely different scales, then obviously there is a huge disconnect between the cost of production and the amount that someone can be entertained.

To further back up my concept, I present to you a video called "Big Buck Bunny" - it is essentially a video demo that was created by the Blender Foundation for their open source tool.

This video is 10 minutes of animation, completed in 3 months with (depending on how you look at the team makeup) 7-9 guys from concept to delivery using only open source software

http://www.vimeo.com/1084537

That surely doesn't look like a low quality animation to me. So it's not an impossible task.

Feel free to read the reviews first.

http://heavyink.com/title/355-Walking-Dead

Runner up, for me, would be Dawn of the Dead (2004). Resident Evil isn't bad, either.

This is also why I liked I am Legend to a lesser degree.

28 Days later seems like the best to imitate. Done on a fairly low budget I believe and came out great.

It doesn't really have a huge scaling potential does it? Your output is constrained by your animation stable surely.

The closest analogue to a breakaway product or hot patent would be a hugely popular IP, but you don't need to be a studio to develop a property.

Perhaps you intend to develop animation productivity tools and the studio provides the opportunity to dogfood. That kind of software still has headroom I guess.

As an animator/programmer I'd be very interested in an animation suite that could do what emacs/vim does for my text editing.

  Is a digital animation studio a startup?

  It doesn't really have a huge scaling potential does it? 

In fact, to further illustrate my point, I'll actually give you a rough timeline on how Disney started.

  1923 - Walt Disney animating on own, formed company with brother in August of that year
  1924 - Joined by Ub Iwerks and others from Kansas city
  1925 - Company size grows to 12
  1929 - Sound comes in, steamboat willie released
  1930 - Staff increased to 30
  1932 - More than 100 employees
  1934 - More than 200 employees, Work on first film starts (snow white)
  1935 - more than 400 employees
  1937 - more than 800 employees
  1939 - more than 1000 employees

What's even more startling is when you consider just how much they did, when each film at the time required approximately 2.5 million drawings to complete.

  Your output is constrained by your animation stable surely.

I've got a different model in mind. I don't want to say too much on how it works, but it has potential to create lots of content with a significantly smaller sized team (to start out with).

That's not to say I don't have aspirations to scale it, I do. I'm just focussing on building something from the ground up.

I've always used the term startup for a company whose potential earning is not constrained by its size. Who are developing something that will generate wealth that is disproportionate to the size of the company.

With a software startup the duplication cost for their product is practically nothing therefore they could fill up their target market overnight. With a web-app you can server tens of thousands of customers relatively easily.

The market is the only real constraint and this puts these small companies on almost equal footing with the big companies in the same market.

With every animation studio it seems that the potential to generate wealth is constrained by their size (and their skill but the scaling power of skill is finite).

The power of a successful IP to generate disproportionate wealth is the exception (and is often independent of the studio).

The Disney story to me re-inforces the idea that in this space, to compete you need more people and your ability to produce is directly proportionate to the number of people you employ.

The growth curve doesn't look like a startup to me, when they were small they did shorts, as they grew over years they did features.

If they had developed a way for 12 animators to make a feature of that could compete with the features being made by 100-200 animators then sure, they were a startup (by my entirely arbitrary definition).

Although where Disney (the company) innovated (IMO) was by producing a product that the other studios couldn't no matter how many employees they had unless they had the disney training and skills.

I've written way too much for how "compelling" my point is so I'm stopping here.

Aah, I think we have some wires crossed here - I'm not trying to make films to start out with, we're going to be building episodic content, basically webisodes to start with.

One of the inspirations has been, very roughly, the sitcom model. Artificially limiting your sets, characters and creating story week after week. Also, since a lot of things will be set up in advance, the pipeline changes considerably to something that Disney/Pixar or Dreamworks would do.

The cost of production for episodes after the initial artifact production is, for all intensive purposes, the cost of the animators + voice talent, so it is a scalable model in that sense.

Think about it like the TV show Frasier. They essentially used 4 sets, 5 main characters, several occasional characters, one fictional character and a slew of extras to create 6 seasons of content.

If you keep the voice talent inhouse (utilise people around you) then the numbers of employees required goes down and so does essentially your cost of production, which is the limiting factor really for why stuff doesn't get made for the web.

3D animation is a totally different beast to 2D (unless you go with a cutout style) in that it is essentially a form of puppetry with digital characters. If that makes sense?

The purpose of this thread was (for me) to get some intelligent feedback on the Zombie genre and a rough estimation if I'm in the right ballpark or not. The genre itself lends itself well to being something that can be produced with a small outlay in human capital which is why I'm investigating it.

Also, the single best zombie variety I've seen come from Zombie Hunters: http://www.thezombiehunters.com/

They've got the zombies set up almost like social insects: a vast majority of slow lumbering, easy-to-animate ones, plus a few special zombies to spice things up a little. Like the zombies that can spit acid. And infected people don't turn into zombies until they die of natural causes. This doesn't give you the opportunity for "kill your lived one before he turns" moments, but I'm kind of sick of those; they strike me as cheap.

Best of luck in your project. I look forward to seeing what you make!

If you're going for scary, though, I vote for shambling and relentless zombies. The good guys are smarter, and they're faster, but the zombies just...keep...coming...

The common theme in them is they are different and "non cheesy". I hate cheesy horror films (Scream made me laugh so hard ;)).

Dawn of the Dead has fast zombies in (Day of the Dead failed partly because they slowed down :() which is a great idea. The "gritty" camera work also works well with that (the sort of hand camera filmed look) speed as you really get the horror etc.

Resident Evil was just epic full stop. Verged on cheesy but elegantly avoided it. Not particularly scary but the sexy lead kicking ass = good :D Also it was somewhat intelligent - it explained the Zombies fairly logically (and mixed in an acutally good storyline - the memory loss etc.) and crucially kept them locked into one location. None of this "spreading across the world" thing. It could happen :D

28 Days Later is far and away one of the best. The Zombies only make up a small portion of the film and the rest focuses on humanity facing the end of life as they know it. It was an extremely good story (really, very very simple but hugely effective) and didnt push the reality enevlop too far.

So IMO what makes a good zombie flick?

- Realism (as far as possible)

- Good, sensible, logical story (it could happen!)

- No cheese (OMG were all gonna dieeee)

- Hot lead optional

- Gritty (camera work and writing)

Hope that helps :D

EDIT: oh yeh make it logical. Slow zombies are never really a threat - I always hate those films where they fail to avoid lumbering zombies. Please :(

Also, I never thought Shaun of the Dead would count. If it does this pips 28 Days Later as my fav zombie film. The writing/story is pure brilliance and the production is very very good. It nails it's genre perfectly.

My beef with zombie movies is that they're usually cliche, and are going for "cheap scares" first and foremost. Often they're punctuated by gore for the sake of gore, and it's done tastelessly. Frequently there's a large cast that you feel no real attachment to and don't bond with, because they need lots of people to kill in a variety of ways.

But the upside: Apocalyptic scenarios in general give lots of options for plot and character development and interaction. I'd say take a look at something like Mad Max - it's a bit campy at times, but I remember some very interesting scenes. There was a relatively small cast that you developed some attachment to, and the sometimes slow pacing made the heavy action scenes really stand out.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a zombie movie with really exceptional acting and minimal cliches. (If someone who is a fan of this genre can recommend one, I'll check it out). What I'd want out of a zombie movie is focus on character development of just a few people who interact with a broken world. And the filmmaker resisting the temptation to have the "dumb, defiant, big-boobed blond girl who doesn't listen to the leader and thus gets impaled on a fence and eaten" - the zombie scenario itself isn't unsuitable for a good movie, but the execution in these films leaves a lot to be desired.

For inspiration into some unique elements, you might check out the first two Fallout games. It's been a few years and I've not checked out the third, but the first two had some interesting scenarios and plots. In particular, humans interacting with other humans during the apocalypse/zombies could lead to interesting dilemmas and development. In Fallout, the world had fallen apart, and yet there were still people being really petty and villainous instead of uniting. This jives with my understanding of human nature, and makes the games more interesting. Human/human conflicts amidst a zombie background could be a fascinating way to break from the cliches.

That's kinda what I was aiming at, plus on the upside, one can generate lots of zombie models randomly fairly quickly and use scripts to animate their shambling.

What I'd want out of a zombie movie is some focus on some character development and the filmmaker resisting the temptation to have the "dumb, defiant, big-boobed blond girl who doesn't listen to the leader and thus gets impaled on a fence and eaten"

Well one of the things I'm looking at is producing episodic web content, so character development (and subsequent demise) is on the agenda. I'm pulling a lot of influence from the Band of Brother's series in that respect.

My beef with zombie movies is that they're usually cliche, and are going for "cheap scares" first and foremost. Often they're punctuated by gore for the sake of gore,

Yeah, I'm trying to judge what people's expectations on blood are.

Thanks for your comments mate, really appreciated.

Similar movies to this are CIA based films or bank robberies/hostage movies. Each of them allow the viewer to actually participate by providing the time for the viewer to ask "what would I do in this situation? How would I respond given x resources and y amount of time?"

I particularly despise the go for gore zombie flicks. I like movies that stimulate my intellectually, not ones that remind me of student horror films.

Not particularly uplifting; the idea is that you HAVE to give in to other people's base instincts, or else you must retreat from life. It's really just an adaptation on an Atlas Shrugged type theme.

- my wife

ps.: I love zombie movies!!!

I guess I'm really trying to feel my way through various settings that could be technologically doable with a small-scale team. This is just one of the proposals, but it seems a good fit for the moment.

(Not sure why I got downvoted, but I did answer a legit question!)

What was your opinion on the movements of the zombies? Do you prefer shambling zombies over say the faster movements of some of the other characters?

Why do people do this? Cause it's cheap? Worst idea ever. If you want to make a movie it's because you have a story to tell. If your zombie movie is about zombies coming to life and killing everyone, guess what? It's been overdone.

The last I looked, about two years ago, there were no less than 5 zombie movies being put together in a two week period in my area. What an imaginative bunch.

I'm sick to death of zombie movies (and never liked them in the first place).

Let me tell you this, now you and every small time director wannabe is making a zombie movie.

Actually, I'm merely investigating the possibility of exploring the zombie theme. I'm putting together a digital animation startup and I'm looking at various genre's that, from a technical standpoint, can be done with a smallish team size for the first project.

Zombies aren't hard to create models for (random human generator like makehuman, appropriate skintones, add gore) and animating them can be keyframed fairly efficiently with scripts, followed by the breakdowns and finally the inbetweens can be interpolated by the computer. Then theres adjusting movements with bezier curves to get realistic arcs happening in movement to really sell it.

Zombies in general also don't need voice actors, which is another gain, as that means less voice talent. Ideally I'm investigating using inhouse talent to start out with, and morphing voices with various VST plugins to keep the costs low.

What this means is that we can get more done (using a nearly infinite set of zombies) with relatively few people animating the series over time.

Why do people do this? Cause it's cheap?

Probably, yeah... why spend money that you don't need too? Also I think that in general, people either love zombie movies or they despise them.

PG advocates finding a small group of users that LOVE your content and expand. This ethos seems to fit this genre.

If you want to make a movie

Actually I have no intention of making a movie. I'm planning on more episodic content that will be distributed via the web to start out with.

Since the whole studio model is being built on a shoestring budget, utilising open source software and different film-making techniques I'm taking a lot of PG's advice on board and treating this as a tech startup. That is what a 3D animation studio partially is, a blending of art and computer science.

As a result I think the zombie genre can adopt some of those "hacker values" for boot strapping a startup. For example, Iteration. If we don't like a character, or he's not resonating well with the audience... we can quite literally kill him off. If we take it too far, we can quite conceivably bring them back in some form.

The genre is flexible to the low capital studio concept, rather than a "wannabe director wants to make a zombie movie"

I'm sick to death of zombie movies (and never liked them in the first place).

See my point about its either something you love or something you dont. It has the potential to make a decent starting point.

my son is a professional actor

Which Starbucks can I find him working at then?

This year, appearing in his 4th feature film at the ripe old age of 20. Now playing in Chicago theatre. Acting since the age of 8. Yes, you've seen his films. (Did you see me, too?)