We were recently invited to come to Georgia to shoot up some of the state’s most valuable entertainment resources right now- zombies. A production company (that has asked to remain nameless until the release of their film) found our Squib FX bullet hit videos on YouTube and told us that in their opinion we were the only ones who could help them pull off their vision. We jumped right on board and were off to Calhoun, GA (just outside of Atlanta) a few weeks later.

We brought a pile of our rigs of course: 6 Rodriguez rigs, 4 Tarantino rigs, a Bond, a Bourne, a Kurasawa, a McDonaugh, and the soon to be released Boomstick and Crazy 88 rigs and about 3 gallons of blood. Our first day we shot a slow motion zombie head hit on a camera that I had no previous experience with called The Phanom. It was being operated by Peter Cote of Granduer, who is awesome, and was shooting at some insanely high frame rate like 1000fps. We used a variation of the Bourne but used a prototype Boomstick as our exit wound. We used flat silicone tubing for the entrance and a giant 3/4″ latex tube for the exit. We were suddenly seeing our work in a way we’ve never seen it before, and it was awesome! However it did present some interesting timing because we were dealing with accuracy within nanoseconds. So if you are shooting super slow motion high frame rates make sure you get in some extra practice with your timing.

We took what we learned on that first day and spent the next 3 days getting the most spectacular footage of our rigs in action. All in all we shot just under 80 bullet hits in 4 days. We found once again that the Tarantino is the most versatile rig and reached for it again and again. And we were able to get our reset time down to 2-3 minutes per take. It helped that we could be a little messy about it though, dealing with zombies and all.

We really pushed our rigs for the time that we were there and they all did their jobs beautifully. We’re really looking forward to telling and showing more about the shoot as soon as we are allowed…