‘Shaun of the Dead’ Photo-a-day / Shoot Day 28 / June 11th, 2003

‘Shaun of the Dead’ Photo-a-day / Shoot Day 28 / June 11th, 2003

This I remember as being a tough night.

It might look like less than 1 and a half pages was very doable but…

‘Shaun of the Dead’ Photo-a-day / Shoot Day 28 / June 11th, 2003

Night shoots can be tricky and on this night we had lots of zombies, the army, fire effects and a crane shot.

‘Shaun of the Dead’ Photo-a-day / Shoot Day 28 / June 11th, 2003

Now you might think ‘I don’t remember a crane shot in this sequence’ and you’d be right. We spend a third of the night shooting a crane shot that ended up being shaved in half in the edit because it slowed the scene down. David Dunlap the DP warned me of this and he was right.

‘Shaun of the Dead’ Photo-a-day / Shoot Day 28 / June 11th, 2003

The result? I didn’t get enough coverage of the rest of the scene. June 11th is close to the shortest night of the year, so we had about 6 hours of actual night and then we were out of time when the sun came up.

So I had the crane shot, the basic coverage of Shaun, Liz and Yvonne, about two shots of the army arriving and nothing else. I remember ending on our last night at the Duke Of Albany thinking I hadn’t ‘got’ the scene.

I actually went into the pub as we were wrapping and had a pint of beer on my own at 6am. No-one got a still of that sad image.

‘Shaun of the Dead’ Photo-a-day / Shoot Day 28 / June 11th, 2003

The happy end to this story? We did a test screening in the autumn. The audience loved it but didn’t care for this ending as it petered out to nothing. So that gave me the ammunition to suggest we shoot more footage and then in January 2004 we did exactly that. So if you watch again you’ll notice lots of shots of the army arriving, killing zombies, Yvonne hitting twin zombies and close up of machine guns and squibs. That was all shot around six months later on a stage.

The footage that remains from this night is half of that crane shot, Simon and Kate’s coverage, the army knocking down a zombie in a truck and the final shot of them walking off hand in hand. The rest came later.

  • tippiviolet

    “Very doable” applies to you, if not your shooting schedule. Wait, did I actually post that? I thought I was just thinking that. Like oops.

  • Tomo Arigato

    My girlfriend works in HBO’s social media department and crafted this awesome tweet the other day. Thought I’d share it with you here since, well, Shaun’s got lots of red on him in these photos.

  • AmberGrindstaff

    more tidbits-I’m watching SOTD tonight!

    • tippiviolet

      Oh, I hope he eventually does this for Hot Fuzz and Worlds End….and that we don’t have to wait for 10 years for each one…..

  • Luke Robinson

    I think I was at that test screening, if a lot of the crew were there too. I remember being in the pub afterwards with you guys (I recall being a bit of a div around Pegg), and randomly having a chat over a pint with your editor and trying to phrase politely that from where I stood (admittedly from a pillar of ignorance) the ending went way too dark, that it seemed tonally to jar with the rest of the film. Was still a hoot though!

  • Bart Remmers

    Wow, you actually did a reshoot 6 months later? That’s pure balls, and you made a great decishaun!