Have you ever put over 2 years of grueling labor into a project that fell flat? I think we all have a story like that. I was reminded of ours recently while cleaning out some old files. I found a never-before released teaser trailer for The Human Strain series…or what would be known to the crew as “The Human Pain”. It was considered by us to be one of our greatest failures; an ambitious vision which was smothered by time, budget, and talent constraints. Today I’d like to reminisce a bit and talk about the vision, the death of that vision, and what the team learned from our experiences. Also perhaps for the three and a half fans out there who actually asked if there was going to be a second season, we may have one burial gift to offer you soon.

What’s the Human Strain?

If you’re totally new to RGF, long before The Walking Dead graced us with their TV excellence, we had our own idea for a zombie series, way back in 2006. The Human Strain was a shot-for-YouTube Zombie series that started production in 2007, which followed a cast of characters independently fighting for their survival before their fates intertwined (sound familiar?). As mega zombie fans, we knew the zombie horror scene was ready for a zombie series to sink their dirty, rotting mouths into. We felt it was also time for a different format of zombie film to evolve with the times, a graphic novel style zombie series driven by different mini character vignettes. Our inspiration for the graphic novel style was fulled by the likes of “The Crow” and reinforced with more recent films like Sin City and 300. We thought that if we shot the series with blown-out lighting and massive color undertones, it would help personify each character, setting and mood. Also, because our equipment was already exceptionally poor – we figured the grainy 28 Days Later “style” would add an interesting dynamic to the series. So we saddled up our hell spawn ponies, also known as a 1995 Ford Explorer, and set out to make a short pilot season which we launched on YouTube in 2009.

What Happened Next?

As far as we know, The Human Strain was the first ever, no-budget, Graphic Novel Style Zombie Series. Our goal was to get enough views to prove that it’s time for a REAL zombie TV series. In reality however, we only got enough views to compete with a 5th grader’s piano recital (and a good one at that, sorry Jake). So what went wrong? We had the vision, the style, and the backing of a hoard of undead fans….But as with many things, it came down to execution. Since this was our third production, we had 3x the vision, but quickly learned that we still had only 1x the ability to make a film.The production was extremely taxing for a no-budget film. Our actors were purely volunteering their free time so it was difficult to coordinate around everyone’s schedule. This led to a lot of compressed shoots with 1 take shots. Also, way back in 2007 all we had was a regular handycam and some lame sound equipment. There wasn’t much that we could bring to the table – not to mention the quality on YouTube then was limited as well. Finally, one of the biggest deficits was in the dialog and character creation. We didn’t have someone who was able to write strong engaging dialogue, build immersive characters, and weave complex character relationships. This made it difficult for the actors to grasp the backstory of who they were, what drove them, and what they really meant to their companion characters. Luckily someone else was thinking of something better and had the backing to make a zombie series the way we had always dreamed of.

What did we learn?

We’d change a lot, that’s for sure. Some episodes were great while others were major flops, but we did the best we could with what we had available and just ran with our bare asses to the wind. Looking back, there are a few changes we should have made. We know low production value is not critical to the success of a film, but that deficit must be counterbalanced by other engaging qualities. Dialogue and character creation is an important process and needs a lot more time devoted to it than just what comes across in the script. There needs to be back story – world building – painfully detailed idiosyncratic character tendencies to make them believable. What would a macho man using ladies deodorant tell you about a character? Now what does it tell you if later you found out they only bought it because it was in the discount bin? Its that kind of detail we now strive to put into our latest character creation schemes. We have also found it is important for our script writers to work as a team. Strong characters, and an intriguing story makes a strong film series – so we strive to work with writers who can highlight those things now. But I think one of the biggest lessons we learned was in execution – that is, how to execute a zombie with a single headshot – and by that I mean how to better match vision with capability. Now we go through each set, FX, and sequence of a film and ask ourselves – how are we going to do that? If we don’t have an answer, we do some rework.

Will there be a Season 2?

We’ve had a script sitting around for years now, but we think we’re long behind the times for the next Zombie series. We tip our hats to all the great zombie series that made it through the gates, but now that it’s been done to death, can it really come back again? Of course, we’d want to go back and rewrite the series with new experiences to offer something more original. As a tribute to our past mistakes though, we’re posting the never-before released teaser for The Human Strain: Season 2 on Friday the 13th. Who knows, if we get enough interest and views, maybe we’ll revisit the script and poll around for eager new talent. We might even make a full episode, unless someone with a big wallet decides they want to chip in, then maybe we can make one and a half episodes! But who knows… if there’s hordes of zombie fans out there, still hungry for more undead glory, maybe there is a chance…or if there’s just one really bored fan out there who watches the teaser about 5 million times, that could work too. We will just have to see what happens. We hope that whatever your struggles and failures are, know you are not alone and experience always makes you better….that’s about that. What were you looking for more inspiration? What do you think this is a Ted Talk? Didn’t you read the title? Everything’s dead…..But I guess we should still give you something, so stick around to catch the trailer, coming soon!

Or…if you want to see this failure in action, check out The Human Strain Season 1 on Youtube.