Sean C. Morgan
Scott Smith and Debbie Jensen’s zombies are shuffling around on DVD after a year of filming and production.
They recently completed the one-hour film “Sick ’n’ Contagious,” filmed in several locations in the Mid-Valley and are seeking donations through kickstarter.com, listed under “Scott A. Smith,” to market and distribute a DVD. Movie memorabilia is available in exchange for donations.
The two are owners of LB Productions, based in Brownsville. Jensen is a former Sweet Home resident, and several Sweet Home residents appear in the film.
They’re looking for $25,000 to get things going, Smith said. The deadline for raising the funds is March 29.
“We want to get into film festivals,” Jensen said. They’re looking at festivals in Oregon and several across the nation. They all take money to enter.
The movie tells the story of a terrorist who contaminates public water supply systems with a virus that turns everyone into flesh-eating zombies. A team of seven join together to find the vaccination center as the infection breaks loose in each town it enters.
“It turned out good,” Jensen said.
“For not having a script to start with,” Smith said.
“We had some personal dilemmas that prevented us from working on it for a few months,” Jensen said. “It took a long time to put it together.”
“It’s totally unique,” Smith said.
Facing a number of production challenges, they rewrote the script they started with, Smith said, and an active terrorist became part of the plot.
The cast didn’t know about the terrorist and were surprised to learn about it later in the production, Smith said.
The cast and crew were all volunteer, Jensen said. “If we could’ve paid them all it would’ve been awesome.”
The soundtrack was performed by Project X, a metal band from Sweet Home, Smith said. “We actually went and watched them play the songs. The music worked perfectly for everything I used it for.”
“Overall, we just had a lot of fun,” Jensen said. The LB Productions studio was a beehive of activity for nine months, with someone there every day, working, studying scripts or even studying for final exams.
They held zombie school there and finished green screen shots. Parents were hanging around supporting the children who were involved in the production.
The movie featured more than 150 zombies of all ages.
“Some of them, it was on their bucket list,” Smith said. They just wanted to be a zombie in a movie. One Albany man was thrilled to be there on his birthday.
“The little bit of drama was totally drowned out by the fun,” Smith said.
Smith and Jensen hope to make more films, they said, but ideally they would prefer someone with a script would pay them to shoot it.
They personally covered the costs of filming “Sick ’n’ Contagious.”
For more information, visit lbprods.net on the Web.