Last week, the Seattle zombie community brought in the holidays with a tremendous undead groan, the shuffle of rotting feet echoing throughout the Fremont neighborhood. It was the first annual “Red, White, and Dead” celebration, organized by the Fremont Outdoor Movies, Seattle Zombie Walk, and of course, the team here at Night Zero.

It was a hot summer Friday, and most people had holiday because of the 4th landing on the weekend. We started setting up the twin movie lots well before noon, in preparation for an event we couldn’t possible be prepared for. Even though the official event didn’t begin until 6:00pm, there were zombies showing up as early as 3:00, excited and ready to go. By five, there were over a thousand people in line. The queue for registration ran for four city blocks.

Why registration? For the glory. There were many facets to the July 3rd festivities in addition to the zombie walks, including the Night Zero makeup, photo, and survival safety booths, horror writer S.G. Browne, a Michael Jackson tribute Thriller dance, and at the end of the night, Shaun of the Dead projected onto two giant screens, but the biggest and most ambitious part of all was our ultimate goal: to break the Guinness World Record for largest zombie gathering.

There were two Guinness Records on the book, an “official” record (which requires a documented and certified tally) and an “unofficial” record, which is approximated based on photo and video evidence. The official recordholder was Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania, with 1,341 documented zombies. The unofficial record holder is Grand Rapids, Michigan, with an estimated 3370 zombies. For our event, we had a dozen lanes of registration lines for first count, and preprinted nametags for a second count.

And how did we do? The registration lists, supervised by two signed notaries, tally up at 3,848 zombies. The nametag tally totals 4,277 zombies. Unofficial estimates from the news media suggest that we had upwards of 6,000 attendees throughout the day. But no matter how you look at it, one thing is undisputed: Seattle is the World Record holder, and probably will be for some time.

In addition to the hundreds of photos taken at the Night Zero booth, there are thousands of photos on Flickr from the event, and a good time can be had just browsing them all. Below are some of our favorites.

The actual production process was riddled with many obstacles to jump over. For most productions we have a varying sized crew, but this was the first time that Anthony was not involved in the shooting. The weather also did not play to our favor. The locations for the vignette are all outside (with the exception of one or two shots in a studio inside). We were originally set to shoot in late November, but were stopped by weather. Another attempt was made for mid December but the production ended up being put on hold until Spring came and things thawed up a bit. We attempted to get the shooting done in just one day, but it was during spring break and so many people were either out of town or working that we ended up having to have a second shoot several weeks later to do the large scratcher scenes.

The biggest thing I learned from this experience was the difference it makes to have someone else doing photography while you are director. In the first shoot I struggled to play both roles at the same time. Your mind functions in different ways when you are thinking about lighting and framing than when you are thinking about emotions and motivations behind the characters in a scene. It was a challenge to jump back and forth between these two things. So when Eli ran the camera in the second shoot and I was able to just direct and things went a lot more smoothly. I feel that this is another important justification in this kind of collaborative work.

The larger shoot was a lot of fun. We had more scratchers in this shoot than we have had on any other Night Zero shoot. It was a good experience working with more extras and will come in handy in the upcoming Night Zero productions. All in all I am quite happy with the final product. I was extremely pleased with the action shots of Jon (playing the main character) jumping off of the ledge and landing on the ground in the most epic of poses. I fully plan on making that shot into a poster to put up on my wall.