Hey hey this is Sonny Hay for zombieundead.com bringing you the first in a series of tutorial/demos, which I hope will show you how some of the compositing and cgi shots were achieved for the movie Zombie Undead.

I In this tutorial we’ll look at the shot we call the “chav shot”, where a poor unfortunate zombie bursts blood from the back of his cranium leaving brain material on the wall and windows behind him. The original chav footage had blood being blown through a pipe (I think) to simulate brains and gore exiting the back of Chavvies head, the trouble on the day of shooting however, was the blood only made it part way up the wall, looking more like it came from his back. So it was decided by the Director to “enhance” the scene a little with some simple compositing.

  This shot was actually fairly easy to put together, I used our “chav” footage (duplicated once or twice, a background plate of the windows and walls (manipulated in the Gimp to remove the actor) and I had a texture of some gore and brains (also created in the Gimp) to splatter behind the actor.

So, in After Effects I opened a composition by dragging in our footage, and then created a black solid layer over the top. On this solid layer (with the opacity reduced) I drew a path around the actor and animated it across the duration of the shot, to be used as an alpha matte for the blood and brains texture. continued on page 2