Disney Channel / Director: Paul Hoen
Disney’s Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3 picks up where part 2 left off, in a sunny, unified town of Seabrook. The former open-air prison/slum of Zombietwon is now the hippest neighborhood in town, and the no-longer fearful humans comingle happily with both the zombies and the Werewolves we introduced in Z2.
This is my 3rd redesign/building of Zombietown, but it has plenty of the old familiar haunts, like the Z-Town Zinema, here improved with its Zombese neon sign.
And of course Zola’s Gruesome Groceriez, a Z-town staple.
But this time we expanded by adding a maze of back alleys for an impending chase scene…
And welcomed a few human and werewolf businesses as well, like Coach’s Froyo and Hair of the Dog, the werewolf barbershop.
Despite the new additions, the hottest spot in Zombietown still remains Zita’s Trash-Fired Pizza, and the humans and werewolves love it as much as the zombies.
In this interior shot, you can see why. A whole horror show of ingredients allows patrons to customize their pies into a nightmare of their choosing, and then the whole sloppy mess is burnt nearly to a crisp in one of the fire-spewing garbage cans behind the counter. Even the lights are customized Zombie-style pizzas. The good people of Seabrook have never tasted anything like it.
A detail of some of the gruesome ingredients and the custom zombie pizza wallpaper in Zita’s Trash Fired Pizza.
Our hero Zed’s (Milo Manheim) family house living room in Zombietown. My operating design theory about the zombies is that after being deprived of life and color and joy by being functionally dead for a while, they embrace an overly exuberant aesthetic as a celebration of a return to life. Couple that with the reality that they have traditionally had nothing to work with but the cast-offs of human society, and the zombies have a very peculiar cultural expression.
Here is Zed’s dining room. Note the up-cycled china that is a must-have for any house-proud zombie family.
The staircase up to Zed’s bedroom.
This is the kitchen in Zed’s house. In a post-brain-consuming time, Zombie cuisine has adapted to a variety of other less than appetizing foodstuffs.
Another view of Zed’s family kitchen, showing the refrigerator complete with Zombese language fridge magnets.
A closer look at some of a typical zombie family’s favorite foods.
A central story point of Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3 is the National Cheer Championships. The alien visitors determine the information they need to get home is in the trophy. Here is the stage set for the most important cheer event of the year.
A closer look at the medallion that houses the trophy. The rings of the outer circle rotated counter to each other.
A detail of the spinning, faceted trophy halo for the cheer competition.
A view of the transporter room in the alien Mothership (voiced by RuPaul Charles). With each of the “species” of people in the Z-O-M-B-I-E-S franchise (humans, zombies, and werewolves) having their own, very distinct color palette, we decided to make the entire interior of the alien ship stark, hi-gloss white. This allowed us to use the miles of embedded LED lights to change the ambient color and “mood” of the ship.
Another view of the Mothership’s transporter room.
The hallway from the transporter room to the control room.
This is the control room of the Mothership.
For the control panel, we used acrylic spheres set in 3D printed sockets as the system for controlling the ship. Each socket lit up independently when a sphere was placed in it. In this shot, the ailing Mothership is getting a jump from a huge group effort of aliens, humans, werewolves, and zombies to help get the aliens home.
Another lighting condition in the Mothership’s control room.
The main hallway in the Mothership.
This is a bit technical, but I wanted to explore a different idea of how to make a spaceship door. This monster is the result. The hexagonal shapes match the shape of the hallway and the whole piece is mounted on a central pivot so it has a controlled swing like a pendulum.
To help illustrate the point, here is the pendulum door half closed and half open.
Although the exterior of the Mothership (voiced by RuPaul Charles) was completely built by our VFX team, I still designed it. The director wanted it both to be gigantic - “the size of a city” -(thus making it hard to get the whole thing in frame for these shots), but he also wanted it to have an organic, crystalline element that would be the focal point of its power. (Photo courtesy of Disney Branded Television)
In this shot, the overall design is clearer. I based all the alien culture and technology on the number 3. So three “engine disks” rotate around the large habitation pod, and are held in check by the huge stationary outer ring. (Photo courtesy of Disney Branded Television)
Another view of the massive Mothership (voiced by RuPaul Charles) descending over Seabrook. (Photo courtesy of Disney Branded Television)
The final musical number of Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3 is also the finale of one of the most beloved franchises in my history with Disney. The director wanted a series of vignettes as reprises of some of the most popular moments in the trilogy. This vignette is a reprise of the song Someday from Z1.
The next vignetter, also from Z1 is a reprise of the song Bamm, with its gravity-defying zombies and black-light sequence.
The middle segment of the finale song “Nothing but Love” set in the Seabrook high cafeteria is a broad reprise of the werewolf numbers in Z2. This silver forest is reminiscent of the moonlit forest.
For the final moments of “Nothing but Love”, the whole community comes together in this spacey, silver dreamscape to embrace their new alien neighbors.
