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The world is about to end as the zombie outbreak will soon come upon us. And this time, they will bring more jobs with them for nearly 200 actors, 1,300 extras and more than 100 crew members. The new SyFy Network television series “Z Nation” is set to shoot in Spokane next month. The zombie show has 13 episodes, wherein it will be all filmed in the Spokane area this spring and summer and are scheduled to be show on national TV this coming fall.
All this, said North by Northwest co-founder Rich Cowan, believes that will be bring something new to the Spokane film industry.
“We’ve done about 50 feature films, but a television series, 13-episode television series, is 12,000 worker days of employment here,” Cowan said Wednesday. “These are union jobs that pay pension and health care.”
“Z Nation” will take five months to shoot. Most of the time, North by Northwest feature film only takes about a month to shoot. Cowan said that they are excited with the shoot and they knew that this place is perfect for the shooting of the zombie TV series.
North by Northwest has two California companies company that will produce the show: the Asylum, the company behind last year’s SyFy movie “Sharknado,” and Go2 Digital Media, which handles the Lisa Kudrow’s Showtime series “Web Therapy.” The executive producer and showrunner is Karl Schaefer, who produces “Eureka” and “Stephen King’s The Dead Zone.”
The plot of the story is that the series will take place after three years of the zombie pandemic. The survivors need to travel from New York to, so scientist can get the antibodies they need to combat the disease.
Since Spokane is very large, it will be the nation in the TV series. Cowan claimed that Spokane is complete with what they have like desert, wheat fields, mountains and lakes. Also the fact, that they have plenty of citizens that will serve as the neighbors in the city. The show will have nine main characters and four of those will come from Spokane.
Greg Smith, a member of the Washington Filmworks Board and president of the Pacific Northwest Studio Mechanics Local 488 – which speaks for most of the crew base that are set to work on the show claimed that the it will make lots of jobs.
“It allows established crew members to build a career, with livable wages and health care coverage for their families, which is fantastic and so hard to come by in a piecemeal, job-to-job industry such as ours,” Smith said. “And new crew members will come into the market as well, which supports future productions and builds a deeper market going forward.”
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