“DEAD NO MORE†This is a bit of a Romero love-in, so if you're not a fan, please look away now... It's also a flying the flag for good old 2D, so if your not a fan, you may also look away now! First I'll kick off with a list of stuff that I used: Paper/Pencils (anyone still remember those!). Smooth Draw 3 PD pro 3.5 Paint.net AS pro 6.2 Space Theremin Audacity Magix Music Maker 17 Adobe Premiere and a hell of a lot of coffee! First thing was to come up with an idea and being a huuuuge fan of Uncle George, that wasn't too difficult. I settled on a quasi-trailer approach set during and just after the collapse of civilisation. From there I made some quick thumbnail storyboards and wrote the voice over dialogue, and took a couple days to whittle it all down into something that came in, in under a minute. Then I cracked out the ol' pencils and my trusty lightbox and started to draw...lots of drawing, and as time was of the essence I decided that I would use a combination of limited frame by frame animation and cut-out style animation. As a nod to the film that started it all, I decided to make it look like a grainy black and white film which would allow me, along with the limited animation, to keep it a little rough around the edges and would also to the apocalyptic feel of a world overrun by zombies. Once the drawing was done and scanned, it was inked/coloured using Smooth Draw 3 and PNG'd with Paint.net. While all this was going on I used Space Theremin to create a 'pulsing heartbeat' sine wave which was then dropped into Magix Music Maker to add some reverb and echo filters to make it sound disturbing and nasty. Once all the images where prepared they where imported into Anime Studio pro 6 for animating. it became apparent that it was still overrunning the minute, so I decided to ditch several, cool but not terribly important scenes – a military fight back and some voice overs about civilian infrastructure and movement restrictions - still miss that headshot though... The voice over was performed by me – apologies to our American friends for butchering your accent! I did nine takes, and used take six (if anyone's interested). Again I had to ditch a line or two, though this was more to do with producing a consistent performance than a timing issue, (kept losing the accent on a couple of words). The dialogue was recorded straight into Audacity then taken into Magix Music Maker to make it sound more like a radio broadcast and I also took the pitch down a notch or two so it sounds less like me – now I don't cringe when I hear it, ha ha! Once the animation was completed they were rendered out as PNG sequences and brought into PD pro where the film grain effects where added then rendered out as uncompressed AVI's. These where brought in to Premiere for editing. The 'Dead No More' title card was simply made in Paint.net and once again dropped into PD pro for adding the film grain filters. The Emergency Broadcast System card was made with a combination of AS pro 6, Paint.net and PD pro. It is based loosely on the old American EBS card, which I believe was used up until the late 1970's (and can be seen in Dawn of the Dead). Originally I wanted to use the actual card but was unable to find any information with regards to it's copyright status, so I made my own to void any unfriendly blow back. Once the final edit was complete it was simply a case of rendering out, though I did spend some time fiddling with the bitrate to find a fair trade off between file size and image quality. And that is pretty much it. In all it took about three and a half weeks of fairly intense work - had a lot of resources to generate from scratch and four weeks doesn't leave much margin for error and fortunately, for once, I didn't need one. Phew! Thanks for looking/reading and bonus points for getting this far down. Now go and board up those windows! Happy nightmares...