The story behind the film

The Zombelina Project.

From a throwaway comment on a chat page between Carl and Leighroy in early February the idea of Zombelina was born.

Leighroy: We were passing ideas around for Zombie related T-Shirts for Carl's clothing project such as AberZombie and Fitch etc when I mentioned to Carl that he should do a film about a possessed toy that eats people and call it "Zombelina", just for a laugh.

Surprisingly Carl said it would be a great idea and I should write it, and if I did - then he would film it.

Fair enough, I mean how many great ideas are born in Internet chat rooms, but for one reason and another nothing ever gets done about them.

However, at the time I was writing a collection of short spooky stories for publication on Halloween, and thought that I could at least write the poem at some stage, because it would work well in the collection.

To be honest I thought nothing more of it, as I was busy promoting another book I had written -The Hairy Plug Monster.. and left it at that.

About 2 week later Carl asked me again if I had given anymore thought to it because he had bumped into a freelance animator, Kim Emson http://www.kimemsonanimates.com/ with whom he had worked with before and thought that Zombelina would work better in animation rather than using live actors. He also said that he had mentioned the project to Kim and she was really interested in the idea.

Carl sent me a link to her website http://www.kimemsonanimates.com/ for me to look at and see if I was keen.....as soon as I clicked on the link I knew that there was a strong chance that this could actually work, and agreed with Carl that we should all meet up and have one of those "getting to know you" kind of chats.


Apart from the storyline of "possessed toy that eats people" there wasn't much else, because until this point I hadn't written anything and there was a good chance that I was going to get exposed. A few days of dedicated writing later I had enough verses to take to the meeting which gave a good impression of the style and format that the intended animation may take. We all seemed pretty up beat about the project and went our separate ways.

Two days later the story was finished and with it - several pieces of minimalist music I had composed for a possible soundtrack including a spectacular waltz.

Carl for his part had been in touch with artist and illustrator James Lawrence http://cardboardrobotstudios.blogspot.com/ who submitted some brilliant first designs of the main characters; Zombelina, The Toymaster, The Witch and an additional image of a possessed Zombelina.

Several more images followed together with a preliminary sound file of Zombelina being read by actor Steve Garry, http://www.stevegarry.info/ http://www.youtube.com/user/stevegarry1 .

So in truth what seemed like a joke at the time has now started to evolve into a serious project which will premier at Grim Fest 2010 in Manchester and go much further.