Run For Your Lives! - Commercial Shoot

Yesterday was exhausting, long, sticky, and full of crazy awesomeness. Two words...



Zombie Commercial. (photo from the Run For Your Lives facebook page)

Holly over at Semper Fi to Apple Pie posted on facebook Friday that she wanted to go do this commercial up in Maryland and wanted someone to go along. My inner theatre/acting nerd jumped for joy and said I would totally do it!! Holly heard about it as she plans on running the Run For Your Lives 5k in October and they were wanting people for this commercial to promote it. This 5k is in Maryland on October 22nd, but next year is the "Outbreak" and Zombie 5ks will take place all across the country!!

So the night before Holly came and crashed on my couch so we could be up bright and early at 6am (ugh. I so do not do mornings...) and on the road by 6:30. We reached the shooting location by 8am or so and were finally awake with excitement!

After waiting around for wardrobe to check out our dresses (as they strongly encouraged not to just wear jeans and tshirts) they were deemed worthy and got shredded. And rolled in the mud. And dunked in fake blood. Sand paper may have been involved. Needless to say my maxi dress (really, I only ever wore it once in the two years it sat in my closet) had seen better days!



Mud was a popular choice to drag costumes around in! People got waaay down and dirty with that puddle!

And my shredded costume. I figured I was on a date with the hubby and we were walking back to the car when I got jumped and zombiefied.







There were zombie cowboys, nurses, doctors, brides, grooms, and even a zombie Marine. We had a nice variety! Some were in jeans and tshirts, others in full formal wear. We ranged from pretty young, like our cub scout or karate zombie, to older gentlemen in distinguised business suits.







In other words, we were an awesome Zombie Horde!

Make up was next, we had four lovely artists who made up a good 80-100 people! I think I turned out pretty darn scary (but my husband disagrees... he thinks I look cute regardless. Sigh.) in the end!









I had quite a bit of fake blood, both liquid and hair gel with red food coloring to look congealed as well gel in my hair.



Next was a pep talk from our director with instructions on what the heck we were actually doing and other information.



We then made it to the field. 2 hours of running down the hill, walking back up the hill, and running down and walking up trying to catch our hero we took a small break. I got to meet some pretty amazing, fun people (you expect anything less from a Zombie Horde??) and thoroughly enjoyed myself. We then filmed the end scene as well as a smaller segment of zombies smashing through the woods (me included!).





Filming was finished around 4:30pm and a whole lot of zombies slowly scrubbed off their make up and fake blood... I still had a fair bit on my arms and legs to take home though. Poor Holly cut her foot on one of our last shots running down the hill, I felt so bad for her, but luckily there was a zombie who was an EMT in his other job (you know besides being a zombie) and he was able to wrap that up for her. One tetnus shot later and I think Holly was good to go!

I helped clean up a bit after we changed, and of course I promised to write a glowing blog write up of my day. Glowing enough? I had a blast working with everyone, from the extras to the lead actors to the crew to our director Chilibear (aka Brian), they made the day fun and I am so excited to see the finish product!

Check out Run for Your Lives here, or Like it on Facebook.





Watch for our NATIONALLY BROADCAST commercial (hellooooooo 30 million viewers!) on October 16th during AMC's season premiere of The Walking Dead. It will also most likely be on youtube at that point and I will be sure to post it here.




Zombie Allie, over and out!