About The Project

We made this project because of our love for horror films, especially the zombie genre, and an exercise in filmmaking, combining two of our primary passions in life.

Go behind the scenes and learn about the making of Dead In The Water, a 3-minute test cam about the rescue of a young girl during the early days of the zombie virus outbreak.

Pre-Production - Recce

We wanted a controlled-environment for economical and convenience reasons; so we chose La Vanoise Village, an exclusive gated community in Sentul, where Patrick Lavaud, our esteemed DOP lives, and we decided that the clubhouse is the perfect location, with its modern architectural style, and we wanted to take advantage of its unique structure and layout.

The recce was relatively quick, and just by using a handphone camera, we designed the shot and action right on the spot, which the script and shot list was based upon.

Pre-Production - The Screenplay

After the recce, the screenplay was written by Aria Bima later that night, and was finished the next day, then a shot list was created based on it.

Pre-Production - The Casting

Edward Akbar was supposed to play the survivor, but had to be replaced due to scheduling conflict, so after a few frantic phone calls, we settled on Cep Hendra, a talented actor and stunt performer from Stunt Fighter Indonesia, who did stunt work on Merantau, Serigala Terakhir, Comic 8 - Casino Kings, and Negeri van Oranje.

The role of the young girl and the zombie victim was given to Nurlita Indah Pratiwi and Aulia Eka Octaviany, who happened to be sisters, and they were both suggested by Muhammad Arif, our line producer. The casting turned out to be better than expected, and everybody played their roles very well.

The zombies were provided by Kompi Zombie, with Yonna Kairupan and 

Rizky Ramadhan Rais creating the special makeup effects, and since were on a very tight budget, each zombie actor played two roles wearing two different wardrobes!

The special effect makeup brief to Yonna and Rizky is to create freshly-infected zombies, not the ones with advanced decomposition or decay, since it is set during the early stage of the zombie apocalypse.

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!

Post Production

Patrick Lavaud did the initial offline editing, with Dipta Amangku serving as an associate editor; the whole process was quickly done in three days in total, on a laptop using Adobe Premiere, because we already know and familiar with the overall structure and flow.

The next step was to give the final offline edit to Putra Syah, our gifted composer whom we nicknamed "Hans Zimmer", and the brief was to create a minimalistic yet pulsating score dominated by percussion and strings; he managed to compose a grand and epic music score, which is one of the highlights of this project.

Meanwhile, Vardhika Iriawan and his team created the CGI effects such as the burning town, the aircrafts and helicopters, 3D machete blade, gun muzzle flash, blood splatters, even the zombie eyes, and everything took about a month in total to finish. The brief for the burning horizon scene was to recreate a war zone just like the Gaza bombing, and the end result was simply amazing. 

After the CGI effects was done, Andrie Yargana and Nurul Iman provided the sound effects that ranged from background ambient, gunshot, machete slash, aircraft and helicopter sound, to the zombie grunts. The only dialogue was "Are you okay?" spoken by the survivor to the young girl, and it had to be dubbed by Nurul because we had no sound recording equipment during the shoot.

The color grading was done by Rivai Chen at Trivision Studios, and we gave a blue-green desaturated look in order to give a grim, despair and hopelessness feel to it. 

And finally, after nearly two months; Dead In The Water is ready for a Grand Premiere!

Grand Premiere

We titled the test cam Dead In The Water, an urban term which means "Doomed from the start" or "You're fucked", and it sounds like a fitting title for that kind of premise doesn't it?

Paviliun 28 was chosen as the site of the Grand Premiere because of their decent small theatre facility that boasts good projector and sound system, not to mention good food and drinks.

Finally, on 3 July 2015 at 9:30 PM, the cast and crew only screening was a complete success! Everybody could see their fruits of labor and hard work right on the screen.

After the screening, an intense discussion was held about the future of the project, and what we have learned from it; and even though there were some shortcomings, but there are still room for improvements, and we believe that anything is possible, if you keep believing on yourself to make great things happen.

Fingers crossed, this is just the beginning...