Monster Mashup

At the corner of Smith and Pacific Streets in Brooklyn last night, anyone with a cell phone was a screenwriter, thanks to TXT of the Living Dead. It’s a condensed version of the zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, projected onto a blank wall with dialogue supplied via text messaging.

The brains behind the operation is Paul Notzold, who took about 500 frames from the thriller (relax, it’s in the public domain) and then created speech bubbles for about 150 of those frames. As Notzold explains on his web site, “Text messages sent in from participants show up in those frames in the order that they are received. The movie moves forward when a new message is received. The other frames are action frames that play through automatically until they hit a speech frame. Once all the speech frames have been filled the movie can then be viewed from beginning to end with the new audience generated dialogue.”

The project is part drive-in, part comic book, part Lichtenstein pop-art, part Mad Libs, part New Yorker caption contest and part flash mob. Although the project is uncensored, texters kept it relatively – and surprisingly – clean. There were the made-in-jest marriage proposals, variations on “all your bases are belong to us” and generic greetings (“Hi, Joe”). But there were also plenty of pop culture references (Geico, Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah) out of sync with the narrative, upping the comic effect.

Gothamist.com gave the Halloween-night project its seal of approval. And Wired recently detailed a showing outside Paris. “Notzold's road kit is deceptively simple: a Mac, a projector (and something to stand it on), a camera and a generator. Helpers distribute a cell phone number on pieces of paper -- Notzold always gets a number for the country he is in, making it easy for locals to participate.” Below is footage from the event in France.



What’s next for Notzold and his SMS project? That bastion of inane banter: the 30-minute local news broadcast. Back to you, Bob.