If the zombie apocalypse were to happen today, would you use Twitter to survive?
This is the premise of Joe Nicolosi’s latest short, “#Zombies: Followers of the Dead.”
The short is more a mockumentary in which survivors of the zombie apocalypse speak out about their relationship with Twitter and how the social networking tool is used for good or bad in times of crisis.
The entertaining short is full of lines applicable to modern life, sans a zombie outbreak.
“Any one who is tweeting in all caps is a zombie” states one survivor.
“Just because you’re the mayor on foursquare doesn’t mean you’re in charge of that safe house” proclaims another.
“Two people, instead of helping this man who could have been saved, were taking Internet videos.”
In an interview with the Daily Dot, Nicolosi explained he’d been working on the project bit by bit for two years, and every interview was improvised.
“I would shoot a few interviews, then come back to it much later. It’s harder to find the punchline when it is improvised, because it didn’t have a lot of the built in jokes like some of the other stuff I’ve worked on. ”
Nicolosi said he was inspired by the tweets coming out of the Fort Hood shootings in 2009. (The East Coast earthquake and Hurricane Irene are more recent examples of Twitter being used in a breaking news event.)
“People were tweeting from inside the base, about the shooters and bodies, and all of it turned out to be wrong. It’s awesome how fast (Twitter) is but with that speed comes no accountability whatsoever — like the recent Libyan tweets, about Gaddafi being blown up, captured. But nothing was true.”
If there was a zombie apocalypse and the Internet managed to still work, Nicolosi said he would “certainly” check Twitter and would be interested to see how people use it.
Nicolosi, who is a huge fan of Walking Dead — “I’ve been collecting the comics since they first came out in college” — admits he thinks about zombies on a regular basis.
“I usually dream about the zombie apocalypse at night. I am currently in LA so I think I would be screwed, but if I was back in Austin, I had a plan for getting out of populated areas really quickly.”
Nicolosi’s past work includes “Kittywood Studios: Cat Videos Incorporated” and “Mario Bros. Indie Film trailer,” which was featured at SXSW.
