The End has Begun

The Apocalypse began a long time ago. Experiencing the end of the world and surviving the wastes that follow has been a mild obsession of mine for years, and to finally be exploring it now is a dream come true.

I started Film School in the Fall of 2007. A year later, I made my first short film, The Treasure of the Bandit King. It was a 7 minute long, black and white swashbuckling epic. The next semester I filmed my Production 2, The Breeder of Dire Events, a 15 minute long supervillain prison movie. Following the traditional Watkins career path, it was a year until I shot my Production 3, a Super 16mm romance. Then, in the summer of 2010, Falls the Shadow began.

In the Fall 2009 semester, I had written a short script with then intention of shooting it for my Production 3. It was a slightly more serious version of the boy-meets-girl story, set years after the zombie apocalypse. However, it was far too complex to shoot for that class, so I pushed it aside to save for Production4, my thesis film.

When the Spring 2010 semester was over and it was time to dive into Development of my 4, I began to look at that script again. It had always been my plan to shoot a feature film for my 4, and while I still enjoyed this script, it was not enough for a feature.

And so it was, that one evening, while my dad, Ron, and I were driving to Arkansas for a friend's graduation, we hammered out the three main story arcs of the film. Drawing from the short script, we have Noah, the Wanderer, aimlessly trekking the wastes until he meets Elena, a beautiful young woman who is full of life and joy. Then, we have Michael, an officer in the United States Army and a member of Special Forces who returns home to find his wife murdered and daughter kidnapped by a local group of Raiders. He sets off with Frank, his father - in - law to find his daughter. Finally, we have a Mother and Son, desperately trying to survive in the midst of the destroyed world. Their survival becomes much more complicated, however, when the son survives a bite from an Infected (our zombies) without becoming one himself.

The rest of the summer was spent developing the three arcs, creating New Richmond, the home of our Neo-Nazi/Confederate Raiders, and writing the first draft of the script.

So here we are now. It's the middle of December now. We have shot for two weekends, are picking up scenes we got snowed out of on this Saturday (stay tuned for blogs about the previous two weekends), and are finishing the preproducing for the rest of the shoot. It is unusual to be preproducing during production, but as I'm sure you'll find, there is very little usual about what we are doing here.

Thank you so much for reading. Keep checking back for more updates to the diary as we move into the next phase of production, and from there into post.