It's back!

Yes, my passion is revived, my concern over budgets has waned, and Lullaby is back! To express interest in taking part, please email me - contact@john-bolton.com!

Funding and Licences

After finally getting hold of someone at the council, it transpires that permission to film in Sidmouth will cost £230. In addition to that, rental of video equipment (camera, tripod, boom, dolly, etc.) looks likely to be around £600. Licensing for music for the film is more complicated, but again, this is a serious consideration for us.

Therefore in the next few weeks, we need to try and source some funding options. If anyone has any contacts who might be prepared to sponsor or otherwise fund the film, please get in touch! I can provide a breakdown of those costs to any interested parties. Remember, everyone involved in this film is giving up their time for free. No money is going to be made from the film.

If anyone can help, please contact us.

Location scout needed!

We need your help!

This is a dilapidated building on Sidmouth seafront (near the public toilets), and we think it would be perfect for a location in the film.

The sign on the front says "DEVON ARMY CADET FORCE SIDMOUTH PLATOON"

If anyone knows anything about it, please get in touch! It looks like it's been abandoned for a long time...

Licence

I contacted the council today to see about obtaining a licence or permission or whatever for us to film Restless Dead in and around Sidmouth. But they guy is on leave until next week. So I guess we'll have to wait and see. Hopefully such a licence is free...

Sneak Preview

I thought it might be nice to post a little preview of the fake documentary Ian and I recently finished filming. I won't delve too deeply into the story behind it, suffice to say that I'm not the arrogant, loathesome git that I appear to be in this clip...it's a fairly large file, in spite of my efforts to reduce it. So if you want to watch it but have a bandwidth as shoddy as mine, you might want to try the YouTube version.

Radio Devon

As some of you will know (either because I told you about it while I nervously tried to work out what I was going to say earlier today, or because you found out about the film because of my brief chat with Michael Chequer on Radio Devon's Lunchtime Phone-in), I was on Radio Devon this afternoon talking about the film.

If anyone missed it, and is even remotely curious to hear it, I've uploaded an MP3 of my 5 minutes of...fame doesn't seem the right word...but anyway, here it is.


Hopefully nobody at Radio Devon will mind me putting this here, but obviously I'm happy to remove it if anyone objects!

Thanks!

New Idea for Format of Film/Making Of Documentary

After a lengthy chat with Ian today, I'd like to just explain the idea for the format of the film and its accompanying "making of" documentary.

The film is going to be a fairly serious, (hopefully) well-written affair. As tempting as it had been to make it more “Shaun of the Dead” than “Night of the Living Dead”, we’re going to try to aim for a darker, scarier film.

The accompanying (scripted, and therefore FAKE) “making of” documentary will portray my character (the director) as something of an incompetent idiot. My character will insist on various ridiculous scenes (including a horribly hammy cameo) which are ultimately cut from the film. However, because he has some creative control, the studio is forced to allow him to re-cut the film and include this “director’s cut” on the DVD. This cut of the film will include all the awful shots, the hammy cameo, etc.. The fake “making of” documentary will essentially sew the two cuts of the film together, showing my character to be a complete idiot, and effectively giving some “back story” to the awful deleted scenes included in the director’s cut.

Alongside all that, we will still film some GENUINE behind the scenes footage, interviews, etc., so that when it’s all finished, there will be some nice “making of” stuff on the DVD of us ACTUALLY making the film!

Hopefully that makes sense! As always, if anyone has ideas or questions, please let us know!

Principle Characters & Plot

For anyone interested....the lead characters now have names! The story will chart the plight for survival of Tim Sharp, Jo Ashton, Amanda Richards, Sarah Treorcin and Adrian Manson.

The quintet formerly worked together (workplace to be determined) in the city (presumably a city of equivalent size to Exeter), and following the zombification of the city, they flee to the nearby, sleepy seaside town of Westcombe-on-Sea.

It's a flight to salvation, as the city is no longer safe for them. They believe the seaside will be less over-run and will yield much-needed supplies. Inevitably, they split into two groups to cover more ground. One group in particular fares worse. Those who survive gradually become aware that the older residents of the town are still alive, and are in fact co-existing with the zombies. Presumably because they are, actually, quite alike. The film closes with the survivors believing they might finally be safe, only to be confronted with a huge throng (the R is very important there) of the undead. The film closes abruptly and, hopefully, leaves a chill in the air.

Express your interest in raising the dead!

If you'd like to take part in the film, please visit our forum and register your interest! Updates on progress will be posted both here and on the forum. Thanks!

http://restlessdead.proboards84.com/index.cgi?board=general

Hi there, just thought I'd introduce myself before we get going on this. My name is Ian and I'm working with John on Lullaby of the Restless Dead. As a long time comedy and zombie fan I'm really looking forward to doing this. It should be a great laugh, John and I are really easy to work with, I promise. Get in touch if you want to be involved or even if you don't keep up to date with the progress via the blog. Also, if there are any zombie fans out there that get people looking at you like you're wierdo when you start to talk Lucio Fulci, that's because you are. Seriously though, give me shout, there's nothing I like more than talking zombie for hours on end

IB

Plea

One final post before I go to bed...if anyone reading this has any connections in the Devon region that might be able to help with the production of this film - cameras, lighting, props, make-up, costumes, locations we can shoot at, etc - please get in touch.

Thanks!

What It's All About

"Lullaby of the Restless Dead" is just a working title, but one which I think will stick. It is, as you may know, a zombie film. We're looking at having a principle cast of about 5, plus some smaller parts and as many extras as we can muster for the zombies. The shoot will take place in and around Sidmouth.

The film will be shot alongside a fake documentary (a mockumentary, if you will) about the making of the film. On the finished DVD, this will appear as a "making of" featurette. However, it's not as simple as that. My role as "director" of the film, and Ian's role as "writer" will be horribly exaggerated for the purposes of the documentary. This harks back to the spoof documentary we are just finishing now. Let me explain...

In June 2007, I went with my wife and son to Cambridge to stay with a friend from University. We did some filming around Cambridge, at the zoo, etc - your typical holiday home movie. However, I'd planned to put that video onto DVD for posterity, and was going to present it as being a real movie called "Weekend in Cambridge", even to the point of putting on-screen credits at the start and a complete credit scroll at the end. With that in mind, I thought it might be fun to script some scenes in which I was made to look like a total eejit. In post-production of the film ("Weekend in Cambridge"), I would insist these scenes be cut, hence they became deleted scenes on the DVD. I then invented crew roles for people - I became the writer and director of "Weekend in Cambridge", my friend Ian became the co-writer, a girl I used to work with became the "executive producer", and so on. Of course, there was no writer or director (or anything else) as it was just a home movie, edited together using the best bits of footage from our weekend away.

Then I decided to take it to a further extreme, and write a full (fake) documentary about the making of "Weekend in Cambridge". To give the documentary a theme, we decided that my character as the "director" and "writer" would just be this awful, awful human being, outrageously conceited and completely incompetent. Ian's character as "co-writer" would be this
exasperated man, absolutely at the end of his tether with me. My wife and my Uni friend played themselves, and did some Talking Heads in which they complained about how I acted on set. Another friend of mine, Jenny, played an actress called Audrey Townes, who supposedly co-starred with me, but who I eventually cut completely from the film (as Jenny wasn't in Cambridge with us, and therefore obviously wasn't in the film!). Audrey is, I should add, a
terrible actress.

With me so far?

That documentary is nearly finished now (we're currently editing it), and Ian and I are beginning work on the zombie film. This brings me back to the "making of documentary" that we will write and film alongside the zombie film. I will again play my role as the awful director, and Ian will again play the writer. So while in real life we're very nice people, in the documentary I'm horrible, and Ian will, I suspect, become increasingly embittered as I make a worse and worse job of bringing his screenplay to life. It remains to be seen who we cast in the film, and how
those people portray themselves in the documentary! Jenny, who I mentioned before, will be reprising her role as Audrey Townes. Audrey is an awful actress, and therefore the actual zombie film is intended to be quite bad. Jenny actually has quite a task on her hands, as she'll have to play Audrey in the documentary stuff, and then play Audrey playing a part in the film.
Ian and I won't be acting in the film itself, although as my character of the director is so arrogant, it's likely he'll insist on a cameo.

During the course of filming, we will also record some footage for a genuine documentary for the DVD, so we can see the process of the film and the fake doc being made, and get some Talking Heads from the cast and crew.

I will be writing the scripts (film and fake documentary) with Ian over the next month or so, and we hope to begin filming it over the summer (June-July time).

If you're interested in a part, get in touch! Leave a comment on this post.

We will be meeting with the cast some time in the next few weeks to discuss it in person. Any
prospective cast members can then talk about the whole project, have a look at the script, and we can decide who would be best for which parts, etc.

Welcome

It scarcely needs saying again, but welcome to the official online blog of "Lullaby of the Restless Dead". If you're reading this, chances are you've already become involved in its production. If not - well done you for finding this blog. The mind boggles what you were looking for originally.

I won't bang on too much in this first posting. Suffice to say - welcome, again - and here's a little screenshot of the production currently being finished by Ian (my co-writer and cohort in general) and me before we proceed with the Restless Dead movie.


Fairly irrelevant, but at least you know which of us is which now.