Meet the guy who filmed an interactive zombie film with an iPhone (interview)

Allan Plenderleith is, by his own admission, a “weird, schizo person.”

He’s a writer of children’s books and a contributor to happy-fun-time TV shows like Noddy in Toyland and Thomas & Friends. You can find his work in interactive apps from Pocket Story, and everything is as cute and kid-friendly as can be there.

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But last year, Plenderleith released something totally different: an interactive horror movie called The Hunting that drops players in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and has them swipe, tap, and choose their way to survival. And most interestingly, Plenderleith filmed the whole, first-person story with an iPhone 4S.

We thought that sounded pretty complicated, so we tracked him down and asked how that worked.

GamesBeat: So I checked out your film site, which is way different from the one with all the kids’ books on it.

Allan Plenderleith: My whole life I’ve spent being a cartoonist/illustrator/script writer, and then recently, when we got into apps from all my children’s books, it then became this amazing platform. I thought, “Ooh, we could do so much.”

And one day I saw my daughter, who is 5, and she was watching a video. She was about 1 or 2 at the time. And she saw a door on the screen, and she swiped it. It was a movie she was watching, some television program. But because she was in App Mode, she wanted to swipe the door. And I went, “Wow, wouldn’t it be really cool if you could swipe the door, and it opens?” And then, it became The Hunting after that.

It was a bizarre path to be an app developer from children’s books. I’m doing well on that, too, to say, “Well, let’s go out on a limb and do some horror.” I’m a massive horror nut. I’m very frustrated by most of the Hollywood horrors that are out there. They just over-egg the pudding. They put too much in and they try to make you scared, and it doesn’t work. You have to do less, and they just don’t get that.

GamesBeat: So which movies specifically are you talking about where they do “too much”?

Plenderleith: Just all the big ones recently. There was The Woman In Black, which was quite good, I thought. My top five scary movies are The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity — the first one — and then back to Psycho and The Birds. And it’s because they don’t pander to audiences.

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I think a lot of Hollywood execs really think that audiences are stupid and don’t give them the credit that they deserve. People are very familiar with all of the tricks of the trade of a horror film. Where someone starts to walk backwards, for instance, into a scene, they are obviously gonna bump into something and be extremely frightened. Or if they suddenly cut all the music out, there is obviously gonna be a big scare. It’s the films that don’t do all of that.

It’s almost like people are immune to horror. The Shining is obviously the grand master of all horror films. And it’s scary, but it’s like a cerebral scary film. That’s probably my all-time favorite. It’s not like I’m scared when I watch it, but I’m certainly creeped out.

What’s funny is, things like the Slender game, it’s so simple, and there’s really nothing in it. You’re just walking around trying to find these Post-It Notes or whatever in the woods. And that’s it. But you know there is somebody out there, and that’s all you need. You’ve got to get into the minds of the audience members when you do things like this.

I spent a long time on the structure of The Hunting and the sound design and just how to creep people out. I’ve never really seen it done before on an app. Apps are really gamified. I wanted to kind of get under people’s skin and make them calm for a minute and then pull the rug out from under them and say, “How do you feel now?”

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GamesBeat: Dread will always be scarier than gore.

Plenderleith: Exactly, dread. Like my favorite scene was the nest with the Queen zombie. We had a lot of fun filming that with the puppeteers and all the maggots. It was basically setting up the idea that this is a new form of the human race, which is a zombie maggot race. It’s cool; I’ve not seen that before. That was such a good scene. But just to take people down that whole path and not give them a way out. Because I said, “Well, actually if you’ve went down that far and you’ve met the Zombie Queen and you’re in the middle of her nest, you’re not gonna get out alive.” You’re gonna die. But it’s a cool death, you get eaten by a maggot.

GamesBeat: And the worst part for me, by which I mean the best part, was when I realized I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to.

Plenderleith: Yeah, exactly. You kind of expect some kind of get-out clause like “Run away.” But actually, you can’t get out of that. In a movie, you would be able to escape, but in real life, that’s not a possibility. You went too far. You’ve had enough warnings. At that path, you’ve been given a chance where you could turn right. And the sound design is there to tell you to go right, if you’re listening carefully. But if you decide to go on, you’ve doomed yourself.

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That whole final scene was shot backwards, that whole scene where you die and are eaten by a zombie maggot. I started the scene where you’re being eaten by the zombie maggot and then we did the whole scene in reverse. I didn’t want any wires and stuff because this was all really low-tech. This was all like 1980’s sort of movie effects. It was quite a long sequence to get all the zombies to go down as I turned around and to get the Zombie Queen to call out in reverse. And then walk backwards away from the scene. Because I wanted the maggot to come out at my neck. The simple way to do that is to start with the maggot on your neck and then throw it on the floor.

GamesBeat: So you were the guy in the game?

Plenderleith: Yeah, most of it. Not all of it. I was mostly the camera man and the director. It was just the simplest way, because I storyboarded all the scenes and I knew what to do. But yes, certain scenes, for instance, the car scene where you’re trying to negotiate the car and get the driver out, I’m the driver. I’m the driver there. The sort of flopped corpse.

GamesBeat: I thought you looked familiar. So you shot the entire thing with an iPhone, right?

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Plenderleith: Yes, absolutely, 100 percent.

GamesBeat: How?

Plenderleith: Yes, how. Good question.

It’s not a good idea. I wouldn’t recommend it. I mean, not because the iPhone is bad or anything; the iPhone is awesome. But because I shot it all in first-person. I considered doing it with the GoPro and all that malarky that you can do. But this was a risky project, and really there has been nothing like this beforehand or since where it’s been shot on an iPhone and it’s interactive horror.

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I was worried because we had just done children’s stuff before, so I did this thing as an unknown territory. Like if iTunes rejected it, it’s an entire year and a half down the pan. So I thought, “OK, I’m gonna film it all on an iPhone.” I did a test run, and we thought hopefully we could use that as leverage to say, “Hey, we shot this whole thing on the iPhone, and doesn’t it look amazing?” And that would be something to help give us a leg-up with the marketing app gurus. Who knows who they are.

Then we had to work out ways to do that. There was a fantastic program on BBC News about three months after we started filming all about how to shoot a movie on an iPhone. This was a program called BBC Click, which is an Internet online program. It had lots of gadgets and technology that I hadn’t actually discovered yet.

I’d found a few, but there were things like the Olloclip, the wide-angle lens for the iPhone. There was the Glif, which is a little grippy device that goes under the iPhone to attach it to a tripod or any other device that has a screw mechanism to attach to tripods. There were various other ones like zoom lens and steady cam and all sorts of stuff. So of course, I immediately went on Amazon like, “Buy! Buy! Buy! I want all of it!” It was great.

Some of them were better than others, and I ended up using the Glif a lot and the Olloclip all the way through because it just gave me a bigger frame, a bigger view of the world. The iPhone is fine, but it’s quite limited in the angle you get, so the Olloclip was a real push toward being able to do this properly. It has two settings, and if you spin the little lens around, you get a fish-eye mode. It gives you a huge amount of detail but some black areas around the corners. But you can get around that in post-production. But it was great. That was what spurred us forward really. We found these bits of technology.

The actual way we filmed it was with a bicycle helmet on my head with a GorillaPod gripped to the helmet. And then the Glif connection to the tripod, and then the iPhone itself with an Olloclip lens, all taped securely. Because if you don’t tape them all down they all fall to pieces as soon as you start running around.

It worked really well, but the only downside is that when you film like that you can’t see what you’re doing. Because I really wanted the iPhone to be my eyes and as a result my iPhone was about an inch and a half away from my face with a massive glowing screen. You clearly can’t see. It was a terrible idea. And so I would have to rehearse the scene and not look at the screen because you can’t see at an inch and a half. So I would rehearse over and over and just go through the motions and ignore the massive blurry glow that was in my frame of vision all the time.

GamesBeat: So how is the battery life when you’re filming like that?

Plenderleith: Bad, yeah. The worst part was when we were filming Part Three. We did all of those farmhouse scenes in one day, and we had 50 zombies all made up and in costumes and everything else. I was really worried that we weren’t gonna get through it because I had only one camera, one iPhone 4s, and that was it.

I did use this one backup battery booster. I’ve forgotten the name of it now, sadly, because I’ve lost it. I clipped it in and taped it onto the iPhone, and by the end of the whole day, that phone still had about 80 percent. That hat was a great solution. I’m sure it’s difficult nowadays with the new ones. I’ve got friends that go, “My iPhone just lasts forever!” I’m like, “Yeah, fuck off.”

These last like an hour, and then that’s it, it’s gone.

GamesBeat: “Yeah, you’re not filming a zombie movie with yours. You’re on Twitter.” I was imagining the iPhone as a light on a miner’s helmet, but that wouldn’t give you the right perspective.

Plenderleith: Well I did try that. I had it up higher, and you our head can’t get into the right position because it has to be your eyes. You’re looking down, and it doesn’t look right. It literally had to be in front of my eyes.

Nowadays, they have glasses with the camera right in front of your eyes. I look at that and think “That’s a much better idea!”

GamesBeat: You look at that and think, “People are so spoiled now.”

Plenderleith: They don’t know how lucky they are.

GamesBeat: So was that the only thing you had to invent?

Plenderleith: There were quite a few tricks we had to do. For instance, there is a bit at the end where you have to jump off the climbing frame. This is literally a 20-foot thing. It doesn’t look as big when you see it in the game.

I thought I’d jump off and that’d be fine. But then I actually got on the top of it and I thought “I’m not jumping off of this.” I’m gonna literally break my leg like your character does. So we just set up a tripod and faked it. It looked like you were looking down, but actually the camera was on a really long tripod that we straightened all the legs. Somebody just stood there holding it and then we went “Wrrrrr” and lowered it down toward the ground and that was fine. We did it in one take, it looked great.

There were other things we did like there’s a scene where you’re on a bike and you get run over. That was my car. I couldn’t really run over a bike with a human rolling over the top of a car, so we faked it. We looked up into the sky where there was a bit of the sun. We cut it to the same point in time where we had again a tripod held by me and there was another cyclist and they were going along quite happily and then they stopped just as the car came, and I just sort of spun the tripod over the top of the car and threw it on the ground.

I’m amazed the camera didn’t smash; it went through so much. You know, they’re really quite brittle. It did really well actually, it never smashed once. It actually smashed about six months later when I was at the supermarket, and it just fell out of my hand and dropped about two feet and just smashed. I thought, “My God, you filmed all of that footage and you were thrown around over cars and zombies and nothing happened. I drop you two feet and you just smash.”

GamesBeat: Did you have a case on it for shooting?

Plenderleith: No, funny enough the Glif is perfectly fitting to the iPhone and doesn’t accept a case. So for all of the really dangerous scenes, we didn’t have one. For the more mundane scenes, we did. When I was just holding it and walking around, for instance with the farmhouse scene I just held it.

There was one day though, the big zombie day where I had the 50 zombies. I had all these zombies, all prepped, everybody was told what to do, everybody was in position. And literally one minute before filming I was ready to go and I look down and the lens is gone. We were in the middle of a forest with this abandoned farm house. There was foliage everywhere, it had been overgrown. I’d been running around the whole day telling people where to go. And I just nearly died.

And then I just found it. I walked about three feet, but at that split second in time, my world just died. That was the worst moment. I thought “This is just not happening.” That horrible sinking feeling you feel in your stomach. At that point it hadn’t been taped on properly. So I double taped the Olloclip and didn’t lose it again that day.

GamesBeat: So do you still film with an iPhone, or do you have dedicated cameras for your other stuff?

Plenderleith: We’re working on a film right now called Camera 6, which is a feature. It’s a high-concept horror thriller about a serial killer on a holiday resort who is murdering people who happen to catch his image on film. He believes that if his image is captured on film, they take a part of his soul away. So it’s a very dark, twisted film. It’s called “Camera 6” because the footage is taken from six cameras. The police who investigated this have no footage on the holiday resort, which is very common because most holiday resorts aren’t allowed to have security cameras pointing at swimming pools because of privacy laws.

So basically the police confiscate all of the recording devices from everybody on the resort. And six of the cameras have important evidence and one of the cameras, Camera 6, is the killer’s camera. So two of those cameras are smart phones: One is an iPhone, and one is a Sony Android phone. One is a camcorder, one is a DSLR, one is a high-end TV broadcast one, and one is the killer’s, which is more like a GoPro. So Camera 6 is kind of taking what we learned in The Hunting and multiplying it by six really.

GamesBeat: So the answer to that is yes and no.

Plenderleith: Basically. Filming on an iPhone now, especially an iPhone 6, is absolutely possible. You can literally go out and film stuff, and people will not know. It’s all about the settings.

For instance, there is automatic exposure and focus, and you probably already know if you hold the screen, you can fix that. As soon as you fix that, it looks like a real movie. If you don’t, it’s always focusing on the person in the screen or the tree in the background, depending on where you’re pointing it. Same on the auto exposure. So things like that, very basic things, if you fix your exposure, immediately it’ll look like a proper film.

I do find the quality of an iPhone superb. The thing is that if you try to film on a high-end camera and try to make it look like an iPhone, then it just looks like a high-end camera that’s been downgraded.

It’s not actually the quality of the picture, it’s the movement that’s important. If you’re a cameraman with a massive camera and a shoulder strap, you can’t move the same way as a person who has a phone in their hand moves. It’s all much quicker, much faster, much more erratic and all over the place, and that’s realistic. He literally cannot emulate that movement with a big camera, I don’t think. So if you’re gonna shoot stuff that looks like it was shot on an iPhone, shoot it on an iPhone. That’s the simplest way to do it. They’re all HD now, they’re all super quality. Super good lenses.

You can get away with a lot on an iPhone — unless it’s dark. If it’s dark, you’re in trouble. I would say, that’s why I didn’t shoot any of The Hunting in the dark. We did a few tests and it was just dreadful. Very grainy, pixelated. Unusable, really. We needed a proper high end camera. So that’s why it’s all during the day.

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You can find The Hunting (Parts One, Two, and Three) in the iOS App Store. Learn more about Allan’s film projects at his website.