Origin Story
Description
Book Written Based on the Chronicles of Esther
How it Could Have Been Better
Specs
The Three Overwhelmingly Cool Aspects of the Party
FM Radio Broadcast as Guests Approached
Video Gallery of the Night of the Event
Image Gallery of the Night of the Event
Image Gallery of the Construction of the Event
Image Gallery of the Program, Newspaper Articles about the party, and Party Favor Mug
Origin Story:
After how satisfied I was with how the Alice in Wonderland Unbirthday Party turned out, I decided I wanted to throw a Halloween Party again this year, but really throw my all into it. I was starting to formulate my “three overwhelmingly cool” things that a party needs rule. I didn’t allocate enough time to do the Alice party, so I literally decided to “start” the party then, in late April, even if just planning it. Picking a Halloween theme was for the first time difficult – usually I always go for a classic Haunted House, Haunted Mansion, Classic Monsters theme, but for this “grand” party, I wanted something different. My friend Ryan suggested Zombies or UFOs as a different theme, but neither interested me very much. I didn’t know what to do. I discussed this with my girlfriend, including Ryan’s suggestions, and she informed me that the new TV show “The Walking Dead” was coming out in two weeks – that the Zombie theme was “trending” and that I should watch the movie “28 Days Later“, which I had never seen. As she is English, she watched the film with me and we discussed London and what it would be like in an apocalypse, and I watched the movie closely and my brain started churning. I decided that I might like to try doing a Zombie Party but I felt a little lost, didn’t have a clear focus. I discussed this with Ryan, and he suggested I board up the windows of the house and make it a “Last Refuge”. After hanging up the phone I thought for a while and realized that this was something I could really work with, and while reading this it might seem trivial, it wasn’t. I finally had the theme, the vehicle, and the feeling of passion about how to do this, and do this I did. Our first “A” level party! This event was one of the most memorable for me. It’s probably because it was my first, but it was absolutely one of the best A level parties! I started boarding up the windows with real wood May 15 and our party was October 16.
Description:
There is so much to write that I am not sure the best way to convey it. The idea was that my three story house in Pine Mountain Club was the last refuge stronghold compound of humans with Zombies infecting the area around us, and possibly the rest of the world, we didn’t know. I lived on a cul-de-sac, and at some point realized that everyone on my street was either out of town or was going to my event, so I asked if I could use the street for the party, and all my neighbors consented, so I used the entire street (leaving some room to get by). A zombie theme is in some ways easier than other events to decorate, because with say, a Pirate party, you have to make some section look like a ship or building on the shore of an ocean or something like that that’s a lot of work, and everything has to historically match. With a zombie apocalypse, it’s present day, and any existing structures or cars or what have you is fine, you just have to arrange them/decorate them to fit the circumstances. This means you can focus on quite a lot of said arranging and decorating.
This event was unique in that I wrote a backstory synopsis as I usually do, but rather than just use it as a basis for what I do in the party, and some narration of some sort might be told to guests, I started writing a full large-scale story just over 30 days until the party. I immediately started inviting people by email, and as of 28 days until the party, I started emailing one chapter of the story a day to those that RSVPd “yes”, then in the continued chapters of the story I hadn’t written yet, I started including people IN THE STORY that had RSVPd yes. As each day went by I got more “yes” answers, and more and more guests were included in the story as characters. I started getting replies from people saying “Oh my god I’m IN the story!!!” The Compound (my house) was in the story, and I began to build things at my house that were in the story. I also put things in the story that were at my house, so by the time of the party, everyone going knew the story, everyone was in the story somewhere as some character, and for the most part,characters I killed off weren’t guests, but just made up characters. The response to this effort was incredible. I had no idea, but I started getting feedback such as “I would come home from work and race to my computer to find out what happened to my character that day” and “I tried to get my bandmates to practice, but all they wanted to do was talk about the story and what their characters were doing and where the story was going”. This was wild to hear. The part that made all this the most compelling was, I don’t think anyone realized that the grand things described in the story would match what they found when they arrived at the party. People were actually taking standing in line to take a picture of Esther’s bunk on my back deck – My thought was “What are they going to do with that picture?”
To try to make this description shorter, I will just list all the things we did as single line items:
- Made the Chronicles of Esther – sending one email per day (one chapter) of the story with the guests who RSVPd “yes” as characters, until the last day, the morning of the event, where guests were unsure of what happened to Esther
- On the way to the party guests could tune into an FM radio station in their car and hear a repeating radio broadcast from the “local” radio station, with a few things that happen in it, and urging people to go to the Compound (my house) to be safe
- We “crashed” cars out front, had bloody hand prints on them, left suitcases and toys in the street with bloody hand prints. I took a wheel off my Dodge Charger rental car and put on a matching real rim with tire shreds I found
- I used my father’s truck to “crash” into a light pole, and used a fog machine and speaker to make it look and sound like the radiator had blown
- The pile of bodies out front was in the story, and it was a bunch of bodies Gina and I sewed together stuffed clothing etc.
- I made a “tire fire” by making copper tubing with venturi and was piped propane from a bottle of propane inside the stack of tires that you couldn’t see. You could only see the stack of tires and fire coming out the top.
- On the opposite site of the driveway in my strip of front grass I had made a row of graves and gravestones – each with a gravestone that listed the name of past ex-girlfriends (I love my humor). In one of the graves (my ex-wife’s) we made a pneumatic “groundbreaker” zombie coming out of it. Because I was using my air compressor out back to run the Zombie going up the wall (and we had the compressor far away so you couldn’t hear it), for this front pneumatic zombie, we made a huge old water tank into a giant compressed air tank, which supplied air to the groundbreaker zombie just long enough for it to work for most of the party. It ran out of air in the middle of people leaving (which is fine).
- The house out front was surrounded in chain-link fencing with a gate that had been smashed in the story
- I had actors within the chain link fence with real-looking toy shotguns with triggers that triggered wireless speakers hidden in crates behind them, firing off real shotgun sounds, and each time they fired it was from the same class of shotgun, but slightly different sounding
- I went to a gun range and collected huge amounts of shotgun shells and bullet casings. I washed and dried them all then poured buckets of shotgun shells in the small “hallway” of chain link fence guests had to go through so they had to walk on them
- On each side of the chain link fence hallway past the gate were actors – on the left were the “humans” with shotguns firing at the guests, and on the right was a zombie that was trying to reach them through the fencing – the hallway was only about 16 inches wide
- I dumped buckets worth of metal bullet casings on the carpet in the house, so guests were constantly stepping on them, although this was nowhere near the density of the shotgun shells outside
- Past the front around the corner to my front door, guests had to go around barriers that had proximity sensors that would detect them and announce messages for humans to “announce themselves and put down their weapons”
- We built a duplicate of my front door with wood and then replaced my real front door with it and then smashed like, like is in the story.
- Inside the house guests would find Esther from the story, a hollowed out shell of a dummy lying on the table with her hair, boots, and fingernail polish the same, dead with her guts hanging out, and the guts were the food for the evening
- The food in Esther was based on where the food was – the intestines were spaghetti with sauce, the arms were meatloaf, there were pork spareribs covering the chest, there was a strawberry sponge cake and whipped cream “brain” in the head
- Esther was made by wrapping my oldest daughter in industrial plastic wrap like a mummy over and over, and then wrapping that with duct tape, and then cutting it off, filling it with Plaster-of-Paris and then covering the inside with food-grade silicon
- Esther’s name was written at her feet as if it was a grave -“E.A. Timee” – her name was “eat me” all along.
- On the wall was the “sign out board” used in the story with the last tasks assigned to characters in the story on it. It also was a partial shrine with some pictures and candles for those who were lost
- Also on the wall was a game guests could play to match the picture with the fact – the pictures were all zombie related, like a picture of the actor who played the main character in Night of the Living Dead, the pic of Ethnobotonist Wade Davis who discovered what the voodoo priests were doing to make people “seem” like zombies in Haiti (The Serpent and the Rainbow was based on this true story), a pic of director George Romero and also directory Danny Boyle.
- Also on the walls were two box-framed containers with glass in the front labeled “Break me in case of Zombies” and each had a shotgun and machete or other melee weapon. The glass in one was Plexiglas but the other was made from candy glass, so during the party I went over to it and made a bit of a ruckus and smashed it with my fist and then took out pieces of the “glass” and ate it – which some guests saw and were a bit shocked by.
- The open bar had a bartender, and of course the featured drink was the “Zombie”
- The band Gypsy Moon once again played, and I played a song on the drums and a song on the bass guitar
- On the back deck, which was open to the inside, because the back deck was completely surrounded with 4×8 sheets of plywood vertically, with barbed wire on top, so you couldn’t see over
- There were speakers in my backyard playing seamlessly looping zombie “moaning” so it sounded like the back deck was surrounded by zombies
- I wrote sayings on the plywood walls with spray paint that were in the story
- I had 55 gallon metal drums with sand at the bottom that had wood on top of the sand that I lit on fire, so they were like campfires to keep warm
- I built bunk beds, including Esther’s out of old fencing material and camping mats plus other shelving of “supplies” for the humans. We made crates and other props and had all kinds of military paraphernalia.
- I built a pneumatic effect of zombie arms and head that would “peek” over the top of one of the walls every once in a while
- We took video on each side of the walls and had actors dressed as zombies walking around,and then I played that video back on my IMS through monitors in the “station” on the deck, so guests could see on the monitors the zombies on the other side of the plywood. Because we actually shot the video from the exact place where it really was, guests could see the treeline above the plywood matched the trees in the video and it really seemed like it was live footage
- I made a table with a zombie dummy with some offset motors inside that would move the figure some with a speaker inside that would moan. The dummy was tied down to the table with a burlap sack over “his” head. Under the table I had a keg and a large bucket of red punch that had tubes that fed up into the zombie dummy. Sticking out of the zombie’s neck was a tube with dispensing end, which the red punch would flow for guests to drink, and out of the zombie’s crotch was a tube that beer came out similarly.
- I made a large solenoid “bang” on the outside of the walls like a zombie was knocking, trying to get in
- There were klaxxon lights (rotating red lights) that would go off every once in a while with an announcement that zombies were trying to get in and needed to be shot and just before that went off I made the moaning in the speakers outside get a bit louder
- We made a pinata out of a “Zombie” torso that was dressed as a character in the story. Guests could swing a baseball bat at it until it broke and spilled. I forget if we put candy inside it or what we put inside it, but it spilled all over the deck.
Book Written Based on the Chronicles of Esther
You can buy my book “Surviving Our Extinction: The Chronicles of Esther” on Amazon
How it could have been better:
The rain the day before really made things unpleasant. It was the first rain of the year and I had so dearly hoped that first rain would happen after the party, but no such luck. I put some electronics outside including my bigger electronics rack of my Integrated Media Server, audio amplifiers and so on, but it was on my second story deck with my third story deck and roof above it, but it still got some water. We shielded things with tarps, but ultimately, even though the odds were really low, it still rained on/at/just before our event and I should have put these things inside. One of my audio effects didn’t work quite right and I was down to the wire and didn’t know why it wasn’t triggering properly and I took it out. Also the shotgun wireless triggers to fire the sound effects had batteries that I had been testing with in them, and during the event the batteries died in one shotgun and I had to try to replace it mid-show – need to treat batteries like we do in film-making – throw out the batteries from yesterday and put in new ones every morning. The speakers that I used for the moaning outside the back deck sounded very loud when I was testing them all by myself, but when the back deck was full of guests talking, they were a bit underwhelming. Lastly, the two “Break in case of Zombies” cases on the wall – the one with Plexiglas was very clear while the one with candy glass was somewhat yellowed. I wasn’t happy that they didn’t match – I should have used candy glass for both.
Specs:
Date: October 16, 2010
Level Party: “A”
Food: We filled the “body” of Esther with foods that looked like they were body parts – pork spare ribs for ribs, pasta for intestines, meatloaf for arms (with bones inside)
Drink: Open Bar featuring the, you guessed it, the “Zombie”
Canned Music: None
Live Entertainment: Gypsy Moon, and I played “Black Magic Woman” on the drums, another song on the bass guitar (don’t remember the name) and my daughters and I sang along with Dream Theater’s “Forsaken” song
Staff: My daughters, my neighbors Peter and Charlie, my personal assistant Gina, my roommate Bryan, his girlfriend Georgine, my girlfriend, my consultant’s wife Angella, my friends Neal and Renee, Rosanne helped cook several dishes, Ryan and his son Alex helped me wire sensors and such. My friend Bob helped me turn a huge old metal water tank into a giant compressed air tank to use out front with the grave groundbreaker zombie.
Staff hired: A doorman to make sure all guests were on the list and dressed “minimally” as Zombies, my consultant Sean’s wife Angella helped cook and serve, and a bartender
Actors: Anna played a Zombie, David played a Human, Bryan played a human in one of our videos, Neal and Renee played zombies in several of our videos
The “Three Overwhelmingly Cool” aspects of the party that we relied upon to make the party successful were:
– The zombie diaries that guests were reading, and the FM broadcast as people drove to the party
– The house being so completely decorated as a Last Refuge compound
– The food being served as body parts inside Esther
FM Radio Broadcast as Guests Approached:
Cast: Georgine, Bryan, Jeff, and Laura. I had Georgine add the disclaimer at the beginning because this was broadcast on a real FM radio station, and I didn’t want anyone thinking it was real. I did not want someone attempting suicide like happened during the Famous 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. In this script I have the disc jockey leave their radio station due to the emergency of the zombie outbreak, and in real life I and one other guy dragged a disc jockey out of burning radio station – KNGO-FM in Thousand Oaks in 1986 because he didn’t want to leave the radio unattended. It’s what gave me the idea for this method of doing the broadcast – doing the broadcast itself I got the idea from the movie 28 Days Later.
