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Nottingham has had some serious film and TV connections for a long time now, but there is also a host more low-key visual activities that take place under our very noses without us sometimes even realising.
One such example is the short, Ay Up Me Duck of the Dead. It’s not just zombie, it’s Nottingham zombie through and through. Yes, on numerous Sundays last year the cast and crew took to the streets of the Lace Market and Hockley, covered in blood and gore, to shoot what is one of the only Nottingham based zombie films around. I didn’t spot them in action but somebody must have.
The brainchild of Steve Best, Susan Hayes and Pedram Karimfazli it has been one year in the making from drawing board to finished piece. With delays on the final product being screened due to the sheer amount of hours needed in post-production – that’s the faffing with the finished footage for anyone who needed clarification. Originally intended as a cinematic short, it got extended to a 15 minute piece as they just couldn’t squeeze in everything they wanted into a measly 10 minutes. After thousands of hours of hard work, they finally got to showcase their finished piece to cast and crew members over three showings at Fellows, Morton and Clayton pub on the canal on Sunday 25 April. I was lucky enough to wangle myself a seat and see what all the fuss has been about.
One such example is the short, Ay Up Me Duck of the Dead. It’s not just zombie, it’s Nottingham zombie through and through. Yes, on numerous Sundays last year the cast and crew took to the streets of the Lace Market and Hockley, covered in blood and gore, to shoot what is one of the only Nottingham based zombie films around. I didn’t spot them in action but somebody must have.
The brainchild of Steve Best, Susan Hayes and Pedram Karimfazli it has been one year in the making from drawing board to finished piece. With delays on the final product being screened due to the sheer amount of hours needed in post-production – that’s the faffing with the finished footage for anyone who needed clarification. Originally intended as a cinematic short, it got extended to a 15 minute piece as they just couldn’t squeeze in everything they wanted into a measly 10 minutes. After thousands of hours of hard work, they finally got to showcase their finished piece to cast and crew members over three showings at Fellows, Morton and Clayton pub on the canal on Sunday 25 April. I was lucky enough to wangle myself a seat and see what all the fuss has been about.
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| Filming in The Lace Market for Ay Up Me Duck of the Dead |
What was shown was a professional piece with enough humour to stop it taking itself too seriously and a whole host of excellent zombies. Main characters Johnny (Joe Deuchar) and Barbara (Dani Reeve), although not the most polished of actors, had a great look and a good chemistry as they are chased – albeit slowly – through the back streets of Nottingham with the zombies hungry for their brains. The zombies were great in that they managed to look utterly convincing as brain dead flesh eaters and their gaits were lazy and lolloping and not those annoying running zombies that you sometimes get. The fact that they’d got some zombie children in the mix avoided the school boy error of some amateur film makers – we don’t live in an adult-only world! The make-up was first rate and seeing an eight year old dribbling gore from her mouth as she staggered towards the nearest ‘food’ was an awesome, if a little gross, sight to behold. With chase scenes, zombie-vision, CCTV footage and slow motion effects thrown in, Ay Up Me Duck of the Dead wasn’t messing abaht.
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| A zombie... |
A great, fun short - if not in the truest sense of the cinematic term – that shows familiar streets, accents and humour. Steve, Susan and Pedram are so pleased with how the short went that they’ve already started preliminary work on a feature length zombie film which should be coming to a screen near you in the not so distant future…
So if you’re a film fan, a bit curious, want to see if you can spot someone you know in zombie get-up or just like to support your city and what it produces - get onto their website and see what it’s all about.
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