Episode 133

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Dave

Published:
Updated:

About this Episode:
I’m really pleased with how that fourth panel came out. Here’s a full sized version.

Zombie Cliché Lookout:
You can only talk and plan so long before it’s time to take action, so hopefully you planned well. One of the unforgiving aspects about zombies is there there are usually a hell of a lot of them. How long can a character’s strength hold out when there’s no end in sight. It doesn’t matter how strong you are, or how much adrenalin is pumping through your veins, you can only fight for so long before things go to hell. If your plan doesn’t have a firm, realistic end-point, you’re as good as gone.

55 thoughts on “Episode 133”

  1. The 4th panel is a dandy! Almost as good is the clown zombie in the 5th…

    • Hah. You can just see the clown’s hair in the first frame too.

  2. excited! 😀

    • Glad to hear it! I was going for exciting.

  3. Well, anyone could see why they’re following him, they’re after food! And I reckon they just ordered some of it to go! 😀

    Now what will they do when he turns the boombox on and legs it towards the car?

    My thoughts are that they’ll totally ignore the boombox or at best smash it accidentally trying to get to Sam.

    • You’re right; he’s going to need to find a good place for that thing and do something to try to lose the crowd.

  4. Very nice! But I can’t decide if I love the 4th panel or the zombie clown more…Ah who am I kidding–i love them both!

    • It’s hard not to love a costumed zombie. Except when they try to eat you.

      • Remind me of the Clown zombie from the end of Zombie Land!

  5. Best of luck to you, Sam. Good to see another street scene. 🙂 Not that your interiors haven’t been good too.

    • The street scenes are definitely more time consuming to do, especially with all the zombies (I believe there are 18 or so here, although not all are visible). It probably took me about three times as long as a normal episode to shoot this scene. Lots of fun to do though.


  6. Risin’ up, back on the street
    Did my time, took my chances
    Went the distance, now I’m back on my feet
    Just a man and his will to survive

    So many times, it happens too fast
    You change your passion for glory
    Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past
    You must fight just to keep them alive

    It’s the eye of the tiger, it’s the cream of the fight
    Risin’ up to the challenge of our rival
    And the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night
    And he’s watchin’ us all in the eye of the tig–

    Right.. Right.. Ahem.. Do go on.. Good job.. Hope you had a nice 4th of July.. I know I did 😀

    • Hah, well that was certainly unexpected.

      I had a great long weekend. And then I had to go back to work yesterday. Sadface.

      • What can you expect of a run for your life scene Dave? Its implied, and if you haven’t realized this.. THEN MORE MOVIES BROSISKO.

  7. The 4th panel looks damn good! I too think the zombies will either ignore the ‘boom box’ or smash it accidentaly… man it’d be funny (but certainly not so funny for Sam!) 😀

    But I have troubles with understanding the last sentence in your “Cliché Lookout”. Shouldn’t it say: “If your plan DOESN’T have…”?

    • Gah, yes it should totally say “Doesn’t”. That’s fixed now.

  8. Very nice! This here is a game changing episode folks.

    What kind of camera do you use?

    • I shoot on a Nikon D60 with the kit lens (18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S DX VR Nikkor Zoom Lens). I wish I could afford a dedicated macro lens.

      • Man me too. By the time I had everything in my amazon cart I was down almost out $1,000…thats aiiiiiiight……pass

        I’ll stick with my Nikon S4500 Coolpix….Its decent enough for now.

        • We’ve had a couple Coolpix camera. Not sure of the models. They’re really nice cameras and I’ll be buying another when the wife’s current one finally wears out.

        • It’s a solid point & shoot but even your camera that you’re somewhat unhappy with (assuming) far outdoes mine so I will make do. There is a lot of other toys I need to buy first but maybe a solid Macro kit will be a grad school gift to myself or something at some point.

          Are you using a gorilla tripod, traditional or both?

          Anyway…your shots look really good here…whatever you have done to change the lighting is working and this story line is fun to keep up with.

        • Oh I’m not unhappy with my camera at all. It does a fine job and would probably do an even better job in more capable hands. The complaints I have about it are pretty minor (smallish LCD, no live preview, etc).

          As far as changes I’ve made, I switched from using the Macro Preset to shooting in Aperture Priority. This does two things for me:
          1. It allows me to set a custom white balance, which I think has really helped with the color and tone of the photos.
          2. It lets me dial in my depth of field so that I can go from isolating a single character/object in focus while everything else isn’t, all the way down to having pretty much the entire scene crystal clear.

          I still think there’s a ton of room for improvement, especially with lighting and color (I struggle with the latter do to being colorblind), but I’m getting there. I just need to keep tweaking my light rig and experimenting with photography. I’m glad people are seeing an improvement though. That’s really inspiring me to keep at it.

        • I always thought you were joking about being color blind!

        • No sir, dead serious. It’s generally not that big of a deal, but it can get pretty frustrating at times (telling apart dark red and brown bricks, for instance).

        • I’m easily twice as impressed now.

          I had an old friend whose entire life was deadest on being a bomb diffuser for the Marines and he was color blind so he spent from 6th grade onto highschool trying to overcome it somehow. Never got into the bomb squad but the marines did take him.

        • I’m surprised the marines took him. I couldn’t get into the Army or Police Academy because of it. In hindsight, that was probably a blessing.

          My maternal grandfather was also colorblind, but was somehow able to be an electrician in the Air Force.

  9. I like his stance in the fourth frame!The fact that you’re seeing it from his destination is really cool. But we all want to know where his destination is!

    P.S. While posting this comment, I thought of a few things that could / could have gone wrong:
    1.) The radio is out of juice.
    2.) The car is out of gas.
    3.) The car somehow disappeared.
    4.) There’s no way to evade the zombies after opening the door, thus letting the zeds know that everyone is in there.

    Of course, this doesn’t mean that you have to use these ideas!

    • I love the way everyone is trying to figure out where we’re going. I always love doing that with shows I’m into.

    • “1.) The radio is out of juice.”

      That was my thought. So this would fall on Murphy or the group’s ledger? A Sam redemption so adventure would be interesting.

      • *solo

        • 5.) The criminals are still out there and they shoot Sam on sight.

        • did’nt think of those except the radio out of juice good ideas

  10. Very cool. Some great shots in there!

    I love seeing the classic Series 1 MF zombie in there, zombie heads from PoTC and then the Clown Zombie.

    I just love it!

    • Thanks Silver Fox!

      I really like those PotC zombies, although they’re so distinct they would be really easy to over-use.

  11. oh crap when i was here a little while ago there were ten comments i went on toy day and there’s 33 before i commented wow this site is seeing alot of activity and that’s just the people who comment some people don’t comment but still read and visit alot.

    • Oh yeah. This makes me smile.

    • It helps when you at least have one guy who is at work staring at a computer all day……………

      :/

  12. Say, Dave, have you picked up a copy of a Pirates of the Caribbean set with a Captain Jack Sparrow zombie in it yet? I can think of lots of interesting uses for that head! 😀

    And the minfig parts would be good too! 😀

    • No, I sure haven’t. What set is it from? I might have to check that out.

      • The Jack Sparrow Zombie or skeleton would be from the Isla de Muerta set.

  13. http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=3626bpb555 – well, that’s the catalog listing for the head on BrickLink, I got mine out of 4181 in a set I picked up recently. It would seem different PotC sets contain different versions of Captain Jack Sparrow’s head. 🙂

    • Huh. I’ve been meaning to pick up that set anyway because of that nice girl hair. LEGO doesn’t make enough girt hair. Or faces.

    • Thats a good set for misc bricks it seems…I need to get it.

      And while Bricklink is up…..make sure you check out the forums…you can always find some store with a crazy sale. A few days ago I bought out the remains of a store’s new parts with the auto fill cart option which ended up being almost 300 parts for $24. pretty amazing. Lots of good tiles and transparent pieces. Everything was on clearance and a cheap way for someone to amass bricks,

  14. If the battery does not have any juice then a can totally imagine a standoff between sam and the zombies. It wouldn’t end well,I can tell you that,but it would be awesome. Use the boom box to fend them off first. Then use the crow bar to kill them. How does the donating the 8 bucks thing work? I have the money. And the person with their weapon. Its a pike and shield. With scale mail(scale armor). I lost his hat though. It was metal with a wide brim. If anyone wants something specific built for them than send me the pieces and the requested creation. Send it in the mail with a return address. Send me an email if at [email protected]. @dave: sorry if I am not allowed to do this.

    • Doesn’t bother me.

  15. Dave the 4th panel should be used as some sort of promotion for this site. Honestly it’s great 😀

    • Wow, thank you.

      That’s actually a pretty damn good idea.

      • Will you be making some sort of apocolypse truck or something? Like say a group of Radicals going across the town shooting things in a similiar tank on wheels thing you posted?

  16. @dave: thanks.

    The 4th panel would be awesome for a movie starter. Ex:*open black screen* what do I do vacation? *open scene* Not this.

    • Probably not. That’s a little more fantastical than I’d like Bricks of the Dead to be. As a MOC though, maybe.

  17. I hate being a nitpicker, but your first sentence should read “that fourth panel” – forth is acceptable use if you were trying to say something like “go forth and multiply”! 😉

    • Ah, true enough. Thanks!

  18. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do!

    I like that sort of “mad dash through zombies” cliché.

    Another cliché I notice was exemplified here was very excessive use of blood. Sure, it makes sense for gunshots and things… But in zombie flicks, a member of the undead horde may be gently poked with a sharpened pencil, and be gorily impaled to death. Dinner plates become decapitators, baseball bats become bloodied bludgeons… I once saw a zombie movie in which I rememer one zombie being impaled on a traffic cone.

    So naturally, Sam’s crowbar causes gallons of blood to pour out of that one zombie with a good whack!

    I like all the zombies, you’ve got quite a horde going. I think the chef zombie is my favorite.

    • The excessive blood is a great one, and I love using it.

      • Eh, head wounds bleed like crazy (although in that third panel it looks more like he hit it in the sternum), I don’t know if that applies to zombies though. I can think of a couple of reasons why it might not – without a heartbeat, the large blood supply to the brain wouldn’t be a factor, and what blood there is in the head might be coagulated.