Production - The Shooting

Shooting started on 27 April 2015 around 8 AM, using a Red Epic Dragon camera, with the glorious morning sun lighting up the location beautifully. We did not use any kind of lighting equipment purely of budgetary reason, so we all hoped that the sun would keep on shining throughout the shoot.

The very first scene we shot was a plate of the survivor looking at the distance, that we refer to as the "burning horizon" shot, which CGI effects would be added later on.

It is very important to begin by establishing a state of catastrophic anarchy and chaos, that happened 13 days after the zombie virus outbreak, in order to give the audience a bigger scope and sense of what is happening in that world.

For safety reasons, we used a machete with the blade cut off for the action sequences, with a 3D CGI blade added during post-production, so the actor could swing away at the zombies as close as he wants without having the risk of injury.

The most fun we had during the shoot was the scene when the zombie victim played by Aulia Eka Octaviany, is being eaten alive, Yonna and Rizky achieved the gory and repulsive effect using a combination of corn syrup, sugar, food coloring and hot dogs, yum! But of course, we had to carefully shoot it with certain angles to make it look realistic.

There were quite a few scenes in the shot list, so in order to save time, we improvised the fighting sequences right on the spot, and we set a limit for the number of takes to five at the maximum. That method actually saved the shoot, when suddenly the sky darkened, and the heavy rain stopped the shooting for almost 3 hours.

When the rain finally stopped, it is almost 3 PM and the lingering dark rain clouds obscured the sun, we were losing light and time, so we decided to drop two scenes and had to speed up the shoot, and from that point on, we were shooting one-take scenes! 

A particularly intriguing scene featured wonderful performances by the two child actors, with Marvell Kairupan as the kid zombie, who came into the house to prey on the young girl played by Nurlita Indah Pratiwi. The scene was shot to replace an outdoor action scene that had to be dropped because of the rain.

One of the memorable one-take scene was when the survivor killed a zombie, and actually kicked it into the swimming pool, so Aldino Putra Widyawan who played the poor zombie, finished the scene with a sore stomach and a cold!

Everybody was anxious, and we kept looking up to the sky, praying to the almighty God for more light, but we finally managed to shoot almost of all our key scenes except two, so we were both relieved and nervous at the same time. 

We wrapped around 5 PM, just as the sunshine started to fade away completely; so we called it a day, and everybody went home dog-tired but happy!