Midget Zombie Takeover

When college friends get together for a day of fun around the hot tub, they figure the day will be filled with high jinks, laughter, and, if they’re lucky, a little fooling around.  In Midget Zombie Takeover, this assumption couldn’t be more wrong.

  The party starts out normally enough with the exception that fat, socially awkward Billy shows up.  While the cool kids think that Billy is going to be their biggest inconvenience for the day, they soon learn that he isn’t because their party is suddenly crashed by zombies – little, tiny zombies.

  Seeking safety from the zombies in a house, they soon find that these little zombies are deadlier than they could have ever imagined.  As the cool kids begin to get killed off, it eventually appears that Billy might be the one person who can keep them alive.  But can he?

Starring: Kristi McKay, Matt ‘Goose’ Goosherst, Kedryn Carpenter, Daniel G. Cramer, Cassandra Crawford, Anita Nicole Brown, Brian Johnson Jr., Jayson L. Hicks, and Cody Strack

Written, directed, and produced by: Glenn Berggoetz

Letter from director Glenn Berggoetz

about Midget Zombie Takeover

         Midget Zombie Takeover was a blast to shoot.  Since we shot on such a small budget ($2,000), we didn’t have the funds to pay for hotel rooms for the cast and crew, so everyone stayed in the house we shot the film in.  It was like summer camp!  We began shooting around eight in the morning each of the four days of the shoot, then shot until about ten or eleven o’clock each night.  At that point I would stagger off to bed to try to get six or seven hours of sleep before we started shooting again in the morning, but I found out that most of the cast and crew stayed up until three or four in the morning carrying on, having a few drinks, telling stories, and hanging in the hot tub.

         The shoot went amazingly smoothly for the most part.  While there was a two-hour stretch during the third day of shooting when the one camera we shot the film on suddenly went haywire and we were worried that the shoot we have to be stopped, just as suddenly the camera began working again.  Catastrophe averted!  Otherwise, the cast members all knew their lines, we moved quickly from shot to shot, and everyone had a great time.

         While we’re on the topic of moving quickly from shot to shot, that did result in some problems for the editor of the film.  Since we had to shoot so quickly, many times we only shot a scene once, then moved on to the next scene.  Unfortunately, this often led to us not having as much footage as we should have or shots where the audio wasn’t as good as we would have liked it to be.  So when editor Erik Lassi got the footage, he was worried.  He then showed me some of the footage (we shot the film so quickly that there was no time to watch dailies during the shoot), and I quickly became worried too.  Dialogue was muted, some takes weren’t centered exactly right, some scenes didn’t have very good transition footage, etc.  I wondered if we only had enough footage to cut together a 35-minute, incomprehensible short film.  But that’s when Erik went to work.

Incorporating a lot of hard work, some technical skill, and (as far as I can tell) a whole bunch of witchcraft, Erik began to put together a film that was not only comprehensible, but fun!  He was able to capture the talents of the cast members, and he even threw in some little touches of his own.  I was thrilled!

         Speaking of the talents of the cast, there are eighteen people who appeared in the film.  Of those eighteen, ten had never appeared in a film before, so it was a pretty inexperienced group.  But I couldn’t have been happier with them!  While some of their inexperience shows up on screen (as is to be expected), I find their inexperience to be quite endearing.  And for the most part, those moments aren’t that numerous as they all did such a great job.

         I make films for two reasons – first, to have fun, and second, to entertain viewers.  From what I’ve seen so far in the screenings of the film that I’ve attended, both goals were accomplished.

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