Danny Boyle’s not the only one with a zombie film about to hit screens—Heide Goody and Iain Grant share their “let’s make a zombie movie in a month” project with us.
Recently, we’ve also been doing a lot of work on creating short form video content: Reels, TikTok, YouTube shorts. We’ve found it an enjoyable way to build and entertain our audience.
We wanted to try an experiment. We’d been thinking about how we might drive book sales using the short form video format. What better way to see if it might work than to try to sell copies of a particular book by making some related video content?
So we turned to one of our science fiction books: Tech it to Heart.
By way of some background, we’ve helped out on a number of zero budget films over the past couple of years, and we directed one ourselves, early in 2025. Making a zero budget zombie film to promote Tech it to Heart seemed very doable.
For various reasons, we had to plan and execute this in a very short time. In fact, we gave ourselves just over a month.
Creating the script was one of the easier things
It’s a very potted version of the concept that underpins the book. What is that concept? Nanotechnology exists in the world to convert organic matter into household appliances. It all goes horribly wrong and people are turned into appliance zombies.
We had a location in mind
It’s a large house that somebody has let us use in the past, and we could picture how a domestic zombie short might play out there. Having a location is a really useful part of making zero budget films. If you have a space, it starts to suggest what kind of scenes you can include. In fact, many of the constraints that you work with for zero budget films are actually opportunities in disguise, because they really help you to identify the shape and the tone. The tone here is (for reasons of both necessity and design) playful and outrageously pulpy.
We talked about actors
We had friends who we knew would help. One of the great joys of making zero budget films is how many people are willing to give up their time to help you make a fun thing. It makes us smile even just thinking about it. It’s as if we’re giving people permission to come and play, but we never forget that a day of someone’s time is a precious thing. There was some reshuffling as we asked around and tested people’s availability. We made adjustments along the way. One actress was only added to the cast two days before filming.
What about special effects?
A real find for us on a previous project was the wife of a writer friend who knows how to do special effects make up. We’d already learned a valuable lesson about how time-consuming that can be on the day, so we made sure to involve her very early in the planning, and built the day around some of the things we’d be asking her to do, and made sure that the timing would work.
Props are also a big part of this movie. As it happens, Heide particularly enjoys making silly things. She was struck with the idea, early on, that a visit to Mannakin Hall was essential for this project (it perhaps wasn’t, but it was great fun). They have a “body part heist“ where you can go and fill your car with mannequin body parts.
Then there was the skip diving. Part of our ethos was to ensure that we didn’t waste a load of resources on the making of this film. As it’s essentially a message about consumerism, it felt as if it would be really terrible to add to the problem with the making of the film. So we went skip diving. It didn’t take long before we had a large amount of scrap household appliances. This came about through a mixture of asking around and intercepting people unloading their rubbish at the local tip.
What did we have in the way of props?
One of the zombies has a toaster in his belly. Toasters are heavy things, so we made a harness that holds one onto the front of our actor’s belly. The toaster is removable so that we can pad the harness with foam before he transforms. Another prop was vacuum hose belly. The actor wore a fetching corset belt that had a vacuum hose fixed to the front of it so that it could erupt through his shirt. One actress transforms into a fridge, and another actor has a phone melting into his hand.
When we tried to organise the day, we broke the scenes up into the best possible order that we could imagine, allowing time for makeup effects, allowing for the props to be set up, and also acknowledging that once people are covered in fake blood, it’s not so easy to clean them up in between shots. It was complex, but we ended up knowing exactly how to shoot the movie.
We had an amazing director who stepped through the scenes with us and storyboarded how some of them would look when shot.
Another important learning point from our first film was to make sure everybody has a very clear understanding of what they’re doing and when. So we made personalised running orders for everybody. Boring or not, the key to success is doubling down on the dull admin ahead of time. It saves lots of time on shooting day.
There were hiccups on the day, of course there were. But we got all of the scenes shot in a single day, as well as lots of behind the scenes reels to boost the social media effort that underpins this whole project. In fact, there are reels and timelapse films documenting every step of the way. We wanted to make sure that we could support the launch of the film with a big buildup of social media content.
Iain edited the final film together. As he went, he identified a few tiny missing visuals. So there was a second round of bin diving, where there were messages zipping backwards and forwards to see if we could recover some of the clothes and props from wherever they’d gone after filming day, so that we could shoot some extra footage in order to complete the narrative.
And then what? We scheduled an onslaught of social media content. Short films across Facebook reels, Instagram, Tiktok and Youtube. There’s enough material for us to have a reel every day. Week one is about planning and our trip to Mannakin. Week two is about building props. Week three is about testing blood effects and then week four is behind the scenes footage from the filming day.
The premiere, though, is the thing. Keep an eye out for the final release of the film on 29 June 2025, and be sure to follow our journey through the socials:
- Instagram: @GoodyGrantBooks
- Facebook: Goody and Grant
- TikTok: @Goody.Grant
- Youtube: @heidegoodyandiaingrant6911 has a dedicated playlist
And, of course, there’s the book itself, available in both paperback and ebook format from our website, goodyandgrant.com
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