Buzz-Buzz

download the windows media file

Go Zombionic Funk! is a production team that was organized to compete in the i48 film competition. The team's main organizers were Kim and Will.  Kim recruited Leyla and finally got Nathan and Ray to agree to play the day before the competition. These later two were reluctant to play as they are both rather apathetic and non-committal.
These five crew members come from two production firms, namely North End Films and owyheesound.

Best picture of the 2004 i48 film competition, Buzz-Buzz! is a comedy primarily written by Will Schmeckpeper, and primarily directed by Kim Barker, but everybody on the crew contributed to the overall production of this short film. For a comedy, this film has a generous amount of blood, violence, and adult situations, so parents beware!

Things to know about the film:

To qualify for i48 competition, a randomly assigned line of dialogue, prop, genre, and character had to be used in the film.In this case the prop was a fly swatter. the line of dialogue was "were making way to much out of this, and character was: War News Reel camera man Dale Heckenbecker.

The kanji characters used in the Go Zombionic Funk! Logo are Japanese even thought the actors were Chinese and Taiwanese.  This maybe due to the fact that both Kim Barker and Keling Du had lived and worked in Japan in the past and that experience left a lasting impression on them.

The "filmic" look that this film has is the result of a few things. First is the proper lighting and establishment of apropriate contrast ratios for the dynamic range of the Panasonic camera used for production. Second, the Panasonic AG DVX-100 was used and its 24p mode was engaged. Progressive scan makes a moving image on video looks much better especially when projected or viewed on a playback device that can reproduce progressive scan format. The 24 frames per second shooting format helps too by removing some of the extra frames that traditional video has (30 fps). Also a narrow depth of field was used to separate the subject from their surroundings. This photographic method is a significant contributor to the unique image quality of this short film.

Location audio was captured using a Audio Technica shotgun microphone.  Normally the audio signal would be captured with a separate recorder but for ease the audio signal was fed directly into the camera. This did not result in the best audio quality but the audio signal was still very good and the camera used has balanced XLR inputs and supplied the microphone with the phantom power it needed.  Only a mono signal was recorded on location and a stereo ambient loop was provided for the both the interior and exterior shots.  This process allowed for the dialogue to be centered and "cut-out" from the surrounding sounds.