Sunday, February 6, 2011

Great video on a budget: how to fake a zombie attack

Heather Menicucci, Director, Program Howcast Filmmakers, who writes a weekly guest post for the YouTube blog about filmmaking in the digital age. You can catch up on previous posts here.

Last week, we made several arguments for why quality matters in web video, and we hear from Howcast filmmaker Lukas Neumann, who said that it was important "because you never know who's watching." Duh! Luke watching the video, you can tell he's motivated by more than that, but as we said last week, it's a good starting point.

Howcast Luke has made a video for about a year now and he's got more than 50 under his belt. From the start, he impressed us with videos like "How to yodel," in which he showed he could build a story around a simple script, working on some cool camera angles, and make us laugh. Last week we featured one of the newest, "How to Survive Zombie Attacks." If we think yodel pretty darn good when it arrived at years ago, you could imagine "Zombie Attack" knock our socks clean.

Luke was clearly trying to best each time the upload. This website offers free access to the audience like no media ever has. As filmmakers, we were served by not wasting this access. Each upload should be better than the last to keep this crowd coming back for more and to improve our capabilities to the day when maybe we handed that check to make something big.

We asked Luke to tell us about how he did it. How did he make this video zombies beautiful on a budget that barely would cover the average wedding video? How did he create an apocalyptic feeling, complete with fiery explosion? And, how he makes it look like their zombie rot before our eyes?

Here's Luke's first "behind the scenes" videos to Howcast. This is the first part of a new series where we'll let you come in behind the scenes to see how our filmmakers make the most creative how-to videos on a DIY budget. Step 1: Cover yourself in plain old soil looks like you've been to hell and back. Walking Dead manufacturers could learn something from Luke!


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