Invasion of the Not Quite Dead

What do you do if you’re a young British film-maker, driven by a burning desire to make a film and you are determined to retain control of the concept, the script and cinematography?  Well, if you’re AD Lane you bring your well-honed entrepreneurial skills to bear on the problem and come up with an innovative internet-based funding campaign that in 6 weeks has already raised £6,500 towards his target of £100,000 plus.

We wanted to know more about the man behind this spoof zombie film, called THE INVASION OF THE NOT QUITE DEAD, and his independent film company, the Indywood Project (http://www.theindywoodproject.com). So your intrepid hack braved the vicissitudes of the A224 to find Antony Lane holed up in his cosy front room complete with ominous treadmill, computer persistently emitting email bleeps, new Wii, and a couple of black and white cats. Resisting these distractions, we settled down to chat.

Antony is passionate about film. He’s been a consumer for years. And not just any consumer. With his mum, he set up and ran Clockwork DVD, the first shop to sell DVDs in the Grimsby area. He stocked it in the beginning with his own DVD collection, offering to provide new copies to order within three days. All the DVDs were American format, there being so few British ones available at the time. After a year the shop was fully stocked and he then started up the first DVD rental service in the area. Sometime later, after legislation changes and competition from the big DVD rental chains forced the closure of the shop, he also ran an ebay DVD shop. This experience was to prove invaluable when it came to designing a fund raising campaign for Invasion.

Selling and renting DVDs also provided Antony’s early film education and made him realise that what he really wanted to do was to make films himself. So he signed up for a degree at the International Film School, Wales in Newport where he came into contact with Ken Russell (visiting professor) and Justin Kerrigan (alumnus and director of Human Traffic).  Talking to them about their experiences opened his eyes to the film industry and encouraged him to become an independent film-maker. The Indywood project was born!

His avid viewing of films and DVDs over the years has provided Antony with a very firm idea of what he wants to achieve with Invasion. Listening to him talk about Tony Scott’s film The Hunger, or the Spierig brothers’ Undead, makes you realise that for Antony, two things are important above all else: a really good strong story and superb cinematography. Indeed, his major criticism of much of what falls within the horror genre is that it is either badly written or badly filmed or both. He is particularly vociferous about the hand-held almost home movie type of horror film that has been spawned by the Blair Witch Project. And he has few good words for mainstream blockbusters like Drag Me to Hell, where the gore is more important than the characters.

So expect something rather more thoughtful and rather more polished from Invasion. To that end Antony has already lined up two potential cinematographers, both of whom have worked on movies he respects. As to the story, Antony has written the screenplay himself, and, if he has doubts about anything, I sense that it is the screenplay that most worries him. He’s had the thumbs up from Ken Russell and the actors who have seen it and that should encourage him. My own view is that his lack of complacency is a good sign and with the crew that is assembling itself around him, he has very little need for concern.

All he needs to do now is find the finance. And that’s where the entrepreneurial skills Antony developed selling DVD come to the fore. His Twitter campaign (http://twitter.com/IndywoodFILMS) is the first of its kind. He now has about 8000 followers and is raising between £750 and £1000 a week, largely through the sale, at £20 a go, of pre-ordered DVDs, along with a zombie photo-makeover and an opportunity for UK residents to take part in the film as an extra. Six weeks into the campaign, over 170 people from all over the world had already signed up for this, this hack included!

At the same time he has also auctioned a sizeable chunk of his 2,500+ DVD collection on ebay, and has secured funding and sponsorship from a number of local, national and international businesses. Indeed, the Indywood project is about to go truly national with newspaper coverage imminent and a BBC documentary due to be aired in a few months.

Now he has had another marketing idea and has teamed up with an illustrator to produce an online cartoon strip which will fill in the back story, taking the villain from Switzerland in 1978, when the meteor falls and the populace is infected, up to the present day on an island 20 miles off the coast of England. It’s likely the cartoon will be made available free to all those who have helped fund the film and maybe at a price to others. So, there you go, another incentive to get involved and about as much information about the plot of the film that you are likely to get anywhere!

And when will investors start to see what they have funded? Antony is planning to begin filming a teaser trailer in four or five weeks. This will, of course, be part of the fund-raising exercise, but it will also allow all us investors to get a better feel for how the film will look. Then, all being well, he hopes to start filming proper early in 2010. He plans to do some of it in Kent, largely to say thank you for the support he has received from the local community, but he will also film in the Brecon Beacons, the Isles of Scilly, and, funding permitting, the Alps.

Lastly, here’s the Scoop! Invasion of the Not Quite Dead is not a stand-alone project. Very few people know this yet but Invasion is only the first film of a trilogy. So expect to see more innovative fund raising campaigns coming from Antony’s direction: he’s got two more films to finance after this one!

Originally written for a now defunct website