Dead Wait - Justin Parlette & Eric Havens

Posted by Steve on 10 August 2010 | 1 Comments

Tell us about your show.

Dead Wait is a zombie-horror-comedy-romance-buddy movie-adventure series about what it means to be alive in a world overrun by the undead. Without trying to be too pretentious, Dead Wait hopes to explore societal norms, faith, and is essentially trying to crawl into the space between morality and mortality and see what's rotting there in the dirt. What does it mean for society when not even death means what it used to?

Where did the idea/concept for your series come from?

Justin: Eric had been tossing around the idea of a guy barricading himself inside his apartment waiting for the zombie apocalypse for a while, and we met up to watch A Serious Man (which is a highly underrated flick you owe it to yourself to see) and started talking filmmaking.

Eric: I mentioned the basic concept for Dead Wait, and Justin immediately started be-bopping ideas about - and most of them were good.

Justin: The pogo stick was lame.

Eric: The zombie fish were lame.

Justin: You said we were past that and it would never be used against me.

Eric: We decided to meet up again and outlined the basic arc for the series, started writing the first season and two months later we were filming the first season.

Name some of your sci-fi influences. Any favorite movies, TV shows, novels?

Eric: my scifi list is pretty boring; Kubrick, early Ridley Scott, Romero, Vonnegut, etc. The normal people.

Justin: In general, I'd say my biggest influences are Steve Martin, Woody Allen, Larry David, The Coen Brothers, and Hitchcock. I grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars, always adored Logan's Run - but I've always gravitated more towards comedy. Joss Whedon does a great job of bending genres and folding them on top of each other.

Tell us about the technical production of your show. What camera & equipment did you use? Editing software & hardware? For visual effects, etc?

Justin: We shot the first season using a Canon XH A1, a light kit we borrowed from some friend who shoots pornographic films, excuse me, "art nouveau," and edited using Apple's Final Cut Studio. Our score was composed by Ludo's Tim Ferrell using Apple's Logic and a whole bunch of pricey plug-ins that I can't even begin to remember.

Eric: There's a dulcimer in there, I think.

Justin: Probably. I'll wager we have some xylophone, too. I know he hooked his guitar up and did some fancy musician-type things. The man's a wizkid. Can a man be a wizkid? Should that be wizman?

Can you tell us any interesting facts or trivia about your show? Any funny stories?

During the delivery guy sequence in the first episode, which we filmed on maybe day three? I dunno, they all blended together after a bit, but while filming that we only got two takes of our actor/script supervisor Jesse banging on the door because this old lady from across the hall started screaming for us to keep it down. She didn't make a peep during the HUGE zombie fight, or when we were running with our camera and sound crew down the halls banging into things, but for some reason door knocking pissed her off something fierce. We also had a blast working with Dan, the man is the improv king and kept everyone in stitches. We're really hoping to have some of the outtakes on a DVD release because comedy gold like that can't be left on the editing room floor.

You can find Dead Wait online, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

Dead Wait - SciFinal Page

More behind the scenes from Dead Wait below:

The Dead Wait hero prop!

Justin and Eric on location.

Justin goes over a scene with Dan Hillaker (Adam) and Vanessa Severo (Zoe).

Eric deep in thought.

Justin discussing a scene.