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Many people ask about the production of Dead/Undead- how long it took, how much it cost, and especially, why are there four directors credited? Well, the production of the film is a strange and crazy story all its own.

The whole idea behind the film was to produce it, shoot it, and finish it as quickly as possible, and as cheaply as possible, while still telling a fun story with lots of gore.

First of all, the facts:
  - Dead/Undead was produced on a budget of $1,000 US.

  - Over 90% of the film was shot over the course of a four-day weekend in August of 2002.

  - The portions not shot over that initial 4-day weekend, consisting of two scenes and gore close-ups, were shot in three 5-hour days in September 2002.

  - The finished film, complete with all music, special effects (including digital effects), and a full 5.1-channel soundtrack, premiered to a sold-out crowd of 500 on October 30, 2002, a mere two months after shooting began. The film's investor was paid back in full the next day.

  - The film was screened three more times following the initial premiere (two showings in April 2003 in 500-seat auditoriums, and one in May 2003 in a 300-seat auditorium). Each screening sold out.

  - The film (as of May 2005) has grossed nearly 20 times its production cost.

The first question many ask is: why? Why shoot a film so fast for so little? The truth of the matter is that, when the filmmakers first started to toss around the idea of this fast schedule, professionals, colleagues, and others said that it couldn't be done; that you can't shoot a movie in four days, you can't shoot on a $1,000 budget, you can't shoot multiple cameras, you can't shoot day-for-night on DV, it just can't be done. So, the film was completed on this schedule not to prove that it could be done, but rather that it's really not that hard.

The idea of shooting the film on a four day schedule gave birth to the idea of using four directors, each with his own camera. Simply put, you can't shoot a film in this short of a time frame and have one person directing every single scene with a single camera setup. In Hollywood, this is normally done by assigning a few minor things to a Second Unit director. In the case of Dead/Undead, shooting 80 pages of script in one weekend, the scenes had to be divided almost equally, so that one pair of directors shoot a scene outside the cabin while another pairing shoots a scene inside, or a pair of directors take half the cast to one part of the woods while the other pair shoots a scene 10 acres away.

In moving the directors around in different pairings on different scenes, they were able check continuity between any number of sequences, and could unify the overall look of the film, so that no single filmmaker's style overpowered others. The filmmakers' previous work as camera operators for a run-and-gun television series, and the use of at least two cameras on every scene, aided in getting the maximum number of usable shots and multiple angles in a limited number of takes. Scenes that required far more coverage were shot with all four directors operating all four cameras.

Shooting in this manner required an insane amount of pre-planning, right down to the minute. Actors sometimes had to literally run from one set to another in order meet that day's shooting schedule. This resulted in each shooting day being at least 16-18 hours of constant work.

The majority of the film takes place at night. However, due to the fast shooting, setting up lights and generators for night scenes was an impossibility. In the months of pre-production, the filmmakers tested numerous variations of the Day-for-Night process, which included developing specific rules for shooting night scenes to make the post-production color-correction process effective, and to yield the maximum amount of usable Day-for-Night footage.

What added to the stress was the zombies. Due to the budget constraints, zombie make-up could not be pre-made from molds, and had to be applied to the actors on-the-spot. Make-up artists Danial Hemme and Drew Pierce had only a few hours to get the actors prepped for their scenes.

Originally, the film's principal photography was scheduled as a three-day shoot, with the fourth day reserved for any extra shots or reshoots that were deemed necessary. Midway through the second day of shooting, it was decided that some scenes scheduled for the third day would have to be moved to the first half of the fourth day, with the second half reserved for wide coverage of the film's climax.

Even before the four-day shoot began, three additional non-consecutive days were scheduled for the film's opening sequence, gore close-ups, and extra action coverage that could not be captured during principal photography. These extra days wound up including two reshoots that were simply intended to up the gore factor of the film. This meant the use of over 20 gallons of blood, slime, puss, snot, and raw meat which literally destroyed one filmmaker's backyard.

With photography wrapped in the second week of September 2002, the grueling post-production process began. With the film's premiere looming (scheduled for October 30th prior to the start of shooting), each director had only two weeks to turn in rough cuts of the scenes they shot. This process was aided by the fact that each director owned their own non-linear edit systems, and could cut scenes at their leisure.

Completed cuts were compiled, screened, and approved before being given to co-Director Daniel Casey-VanHout for color correction. During color-correction, co-Director Mark Thomas Elliott worked on sound effects editing and Kimberly Curtis began the premiere promotional campaign while co-Director Richard Ferrando worked on the film's digital effects shots and composed the score.

When some preliminary music was completed, the opening of the film was delivered to Keven Carter to develop the title sequence. The completed titles and color-corrected shots were then compiled to create the final* 87-minute cut.

Two weeks before the premiere, Bruce Campbell and Mike Kallio (Director of Hatred of a Minute) were invited to special private screening of the final cut with the filmmakers. After the film was over, and Campbell provided a sarcastic quote for the promotion of the film, the filmmakers realized that the film was too slow, too long, and in desperate need of rearrangement.

With almost no time left before the big public screening, for which tickets had already been sold, the film was recut, some sequences rearranged, and ten minutes of footage, including two full scenes, were cut out of the film. During the final week-and-a-half, co-Director Richard Ferrando mixed the 5.1-channel soundtrack for the premiere.

On October 28, 2002, the 500-seat auditorium booked for Devil's Night premiere of Dead/Undead sold out. Dozens upon dozens of people, including family members of the cast and crew who had waited until the last minute, could not get tickets.

The final cut with the complete sound mix was finished at approximately 6am on October 30, 2002; only 13 hours before the premiere.

The theatre used for the screening had no means for inputting an external multi-channel source, so a complex means of decoding the surround mix from the projection DVD and inputting it into the house sound system had to be invented on-site.

Despite the insane schedule and huge amount of jury-rigging required, the premiere was an enormous success, and prompted three more successful screenings in 2003.

Over the course of 2003, Dead/Undead was aggressively marketed to video distributors, finally landing its first distribution deal with Germany's I-On New Media in January of 2004.

In order to increase the film's short 77-minute running time, the distributors requested that new footage be added to the film. Knowing footage previously deleted from the film was unusable, the filmmakers decided to add a brand new scene to the end of the film as a "Two Years Later" epilogue. The new scene was shot in two days in April of 2004, and was designed to feature far more sophisticated action and visuals than the original film, as well as to add a healthy helping of extra gore.

The completed, now 91-minute feature, was released on DVD in Germany, Austria, and the German-speaking region of Switzerland in March of 2005, and I-On is presently marketing the film to other territories.