One aspect of Zombies Keep Out that always makes me laugh is the effect on players when they take bite tokens as their Terrible Thing choice. As players get bitten, they become increasingly zombified, and both their speech and mannerisms begin to reflect this change.

As zombification doesn’t happen all at once, the first bite a player takes merely causes him to slur his speech while talking to the other players. With two bites, a player may only grumble, using barely intelligible speech. Three bites will prevent a player from using any words at all, forcing him to speak in grunts, grumbles, and hand motions. With four or more bites, a player must moan and act like a zombie… at all times!

To reflect the zombie transformation while preparing to shoot footage for the Zombies Keep Out Tutorial, we thought it might be fun to have Will Shick not only physically become a zombie but to talk like one as well. In the end, we opted to use Will’s normal voice for the video; however, we did shoot some footage of him delivering his lines like a zombie. So, I cut these clips together as an example of how taking bite tokens will affect players.

Always full of fun ideas, Creative Director Ed Bourelle also suggested we slowly increase the size of Will’s head in the Zombies Keep Out Tutorial—everyone knows zombies have enormous heads. To accomplish this, Will delivered each bit of dialogue twice: once as we filmed him normally in front of the green screen and once where he wore a green neck-covering that would allow me to isolate his head during editing.

After that, it was a simple matter to key out both his body and head and color-correct his skin to a bright, zombie-like yellow. Then, with the help of some motion tracking, we reattached Will’s newly enlarged head onto his normal body.

Now that Will’s zombie infection is complete, we’re considering the expansion Will Keep Out. I’ll keep you posted if that goes anywhere.

Happy gaming—and don’t get bit!