The Walking Dead

by EB

The summer of 2009 was possibly the best summer ever. I found myself shooting zombies, hiding out, and reading lines off a piece of paper. I was the star of a movie my friend Meghan and I made based on our favorite comic book, The Walking Dead. Here’s how it all began.

First, Meghan got me addicted to all the comics she ever read. One day she threw a pile of randomly selected comics on the table, from The Green Lantern to Iron Man to Ghost Rider. I didn’t know which one to read first! Finally I chose one called The Walking Dead: Volume 4.

“Read the first one… it’s best if you start at the beginning.” She scrambled through the books. A horrible cover of zombies and gore caught my eye, blood and rotting flesh everywhere. I was overcome with enjoyment; I couldn’t wait to read it and experience the gore for myself.

I opened it up and read the first page. A police officer named Rick was shooting at some zombies. I couldn’t stop reading. After I got done with the first, I continued… and before I knew it, I was finished with the whole series.

“Meghan, we have to make this into a movie. It’s too good to not be as famous as Iron Man. This is crazy!”
For the next few months, we planned and bought props and wigs and wrote out a script. We came to a bump, though.
“Uh…Erin, do you own a video camera?” Meghan asked.
“No, I assumed you had one.” We quickly looked at each other and called everyone we knew to see if they had a camera. None did.
“What are we going to do now? We can’t just give up!”
“We might have to,” she said to me. Then I realized her mom worked at a camera store, and we could borrow a camera from there.

Now that we had resolved that issue, we could get back to shooting zombies and resolving other problems on set. It took two months to prepare and one month to film. It wasn’t an easy process.

Finally, our movie was complete and ready to burn onto a CD. We went out and bought new CD cases and printed out a paper describing who everyone was. We sold 38 copies for 10 dollars each. You do the math. The day after we sold the 38th copy, we saw a devastating commercial. They are making a Walking Dead TV show in the summer of 2010. We did all that work for nothing! We did so much work, and took up our whole summer, and someone ripped us off. I was so mad. I wanted to break all of the extra CDs over my knee and forget everything that happened.

But then I realized it wasn’t just about that. I’d still created something amazing and had the best summer ever, and that’s the most important thing.