Poll: Do you like zombie movies?

Saw Shaun of the Dead, felt guilty for wasting my life, but not as guilty as I would have watching a "serious" zombie movie.

You're wrong actually, and I'll tell you why.

I have a hunch that people who are early adopters of things online are usually the same kind of people who are into Zombie films. The whole point of putting this onto HN (as opposed to a movie site) is that I would get intelligent discussion, with people articulating what it specifically is about these films that appeals to them (or not) - which is the exact type of data I'm seeing.

The reason I left it as a simple binary choice was so that I could gauge to what extent my hunch was correct (as a rough percentage). So far, the results are about what I expected, so I'm fairly pleased with it up until now, but I'll wait until a few days to pass final judgement.

I'm not sure if you're trolling or not (the general tone of your comments in the past seems to suggest a general negative attitude), but I thought I'd address some of your points.

Let me tell you this, now you and every small time director wannabe is making a zombie movie.

Actually, I'm merely investigating the possibility of exploring the zombie theme. I'm putting together a digital animation startup and I'm looking at various genre's that, from a technical standpoint, can be done with a smallish team size for the first project.

Zombies aren't hard to create models for (random human generator like makehuman, appropriate skintones, add gore) and animating them can be keyframed fairly efficiently with scripts, followed by the breakdowns and finally the inbetweens can be interpolated by the computer. Then theres adjusting movements with bezier curves to get realistic arcs happening in movement to really sell it.

Zombies in general also don't need voice actors, which is another gain, as that means less voice talent. Ideally I'm investigating using inhouse talent to start out with, and morphing voices with various VST plugins to keep the costs low.

What this means is that we can get more done (using a nearly infinite set of zombies) with relatively few people animating the series over time.

Why do people do this? Cause it's cheap?

Probably, yeah... why spend money that you don't need too? Also I think that in general, people either love zombie movies or they despise them.

PG advocates finding a small group of users that LOVE your content and expand. This ethos seems to fit this genre.

If you want to make a movie

Actually I have no intention of making a movie. I'm planning on more episodic content that will be distributed via the web to start out with.

Since the whole studio model is being built on a shoestring budget, utilising open source software and different film-making techniques I'm taking a lot of PG's advice on board and treating this as a tech startup. That is what a 3D animation studio partially is, a blending of art and computer science.

As a result I think the zombie genre can adopt some of those "hacker values" for boot strapping a startup. For example, Iteration. If we don't like a character, or he's not resonating well with the audience... we can quite literally kill him off. If we take it too far, we can quite conceivably bring them back in some form.

The genre is flexible to the low capital studio concept, rather than a "wannabe director wants to make a zombie movie"

I'm sick to death of zombie movies (and never liked them in the first place).

See my point about its either something you love or something you dont. It has the potential to make a decent starting point.

my son is a professional actor

Which Starbucks can I find him working at then?

Ahhh, finally, a question on HN I can answer!

Firstly, I'm a huge fan of the zombie apocalypse.

-So, why do I like it?

I love the genre because, by far and large, because it creates a reality that works very counter-intuitively. Sure, zombies are a threat, but bigger picture, they're just a background concern compared to the threat that other people present, and that's where the meat of good zombie apocalypse media resides: human interaction.

The scenario allows for an accelerated skewing of human interaction that extends not to just distrust of strangers, but absolute loyalty to anyone that's proven their trust. Anyone showing slight signs of mental instability is now a huge threat to your livelihood, and anyone not pulling their weight may have be killed or left for dead (which is effectively killing them yourself.) What, in our world, are the slightest of concerns, become large factors in a zombie infested world.

-Favorite zombie media? Night of the Living Dead (which is public domain and free at http://www.archive.org/details/night_of_the_living_dead http://www.archive.org/details/night_of_the_living_dead_dvd And Romero's others (Dawn, Day, Land, just not Diary.) Shaughn of the Dead, Zombi II (Shark v Zombie; how can you go wrong there? Otherwise blah) 28 Days Later (Yeah, yeah, whatever. Listen to the commentary. They know it's a zombie flick.) and the UK show Dead Set was worth watching too.

Most other zombie flicks just aren't that good.

The comic The Walking Dead is without a doubt some of the best zombie media out there (I collect it in TPBs, and need to grab the latest.)

Max Brooks' books World War Z (interview-like retelling of the Zombie War with veterans,) and Zombie Survival Guide (Almost like a 'for Dummies' book) are must-reads.

And the game Urban Dead http://www.urbandead.com is pretty fun initially as well, but didn't have a ood 'end-game' when I was playing. Now it all looks relatively safe: http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/Suburb (map)

-As for anything else I'd add...

Just that gore isn't necessarily required, but if you ARE going to do it, well, make it worthwhile. ;)

And feel free to email if you think of any follow-up questions for zombie fans.!

First, I'll note that what you wrote here somewhat contradicts your original post. Also, HN is comprised of a very small subset of early adopters - namely, the sort who create their own services. This is an absurdly small and misleading sample, even within your stated target.

Second, again -- you're looking at a potential audience of 0.01% (HN-reading zombie-movie-lovers) versus a large, general audience of young viewers who enjoy (and pay for) digital animation content. How does that make sense? You specifically stated that you wanted to do this as a low-cost thing -- thus you can't be making high-quality, specialized content that caters specifically to a dedicated audience of zombie-movie-lovers who would be willing to pay for it... Have you thought out your business plan here?