F.Y.I.D.I. Films is excited to announce the start of their crowdfunding campaign for the feature length film project The Song the Zombie Sang, based on the classic short story by Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg.
Written and to be directed by A.T. Sayre (writer/ director of the award winning feature film Whatever Makes You Happy), The Song the Zombie Sang is planned as a low budget independent production, to be funded primarily (if not exclusively) by its Indiegogo crowd funding campaign, in partnership with Indiereign. Principal photography will occur at the end of the campaign, between late in 2014 and the spring of 2015.
The film evolves around Nils Bekh, who was once the world’s greatest living musician and composer. With the ultracembalo, a musical system that uses a neural interface and data gloves, he created and performed some of the greatest compositions in history. He died an icon, his name and music deeply etched into the story of humanity.
But Bekh the musician continues on. He is reanimated nightly to perform for an adoring public. In death, Nils Bekh has the immortality that before only a man’s work could achieve without him. Outside the circles of wealth and privilege that flock to his concerts is Rhoda, a gifted young music student in the infancy of her own career. Driven to the point of obsession, she has few friends other than her doting and supportive boyfriend, who is determined to stand by her. Most everyone else sees her as arrogant and self absorbed. But Rhoda doesn’t pay them any attention; both slave and master to her art, the only things that matter to her are the melodies and compositions that constantly swirl about in her head.
On the verge of an enormous creative breakthrough, her academic career crumbles around her and she lashes out at the few friends she has. Feeling frustrated and hopeless, Rhoda is determined to meet and confront Bekh, whose performances she finds soulless and whose success she envies.
With a daring and dangerous plan, she breaks into the hall where he lays, awaiting another call to his half life, another call to perform. When she finally comes face to face with the great composer, their meeting turns into a pivotal night for both her and the legendary icon.
Indiegogo crowdfunding page
Official site
Twitter feed
Facebook Page
Contact Information
A.T. Sayre
F.Y.I.D.I. Films
at.sayre@gmail.com
(617) 416-1623
Lynnaire MacDonald
Indie Film Sprites
indiefilmspritehq@gmail.com
Harlan Ellison is a world renowned American speculative fiction writer. He has published over 1,700 works, ranging from short stories, novellas, graphic novels, screenplays, teleplays, and essays on a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media.
During his career Ellison has won multiple awards, including eleven Hugo awards, four Nebula awards (and is the only person ever win three for best short story), eighteen Locus Poll awards, six Bram Stoker awards, two Edgar Allan Poe awards, four Writer’s Guild of America awards, two Georges Méliès fantasy film awards, and a World Fantasy Award.
Ellison also has been awarded Lifetime Achievement awards from both the World Fantasy Convention in 1993 and the Horror Writer’s association in 1996. The World Horror Convention named him Grand Master in 2000, and the Science Fiction Writers of America named him its 23rd Grand Master of fantasy and science fiction in 2006. He was inducted into The Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2011. Also in 2011 he received the fourth J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction.
He was awarded the Silver Pen for Journalism by the international writers’ union in 1990. In 1998, he was awarded the “Defender of Liberty” award by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. In March 1998, the National Women’s Committee of Brandeis University honored him with their 1998 Words, Wit, Wisdom award.
Among his notable works are his Hugo and Nebula award winning “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman (1965), which is one of the most reprinted stories in the English language, Hugo award winning I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1967), Edgar Allan Poe award winning The Whimper of Whipped Dogs (1973), Hugo and Nebula award winning Jeffty if Five (1977), and Paladin of the Lost Hour (1985), whose novella won a Hugo award in 1986 and teleplay adaptation for the New Twilight Zone won a WGA award in 1987.
Ellison wrote the teleplay for the original Outer Limits episode and WGA award winner Demon with a Glass Hand (1964) and the original Star Trek episode and WGA award winner City on the Edge of Forever (1967). He was also editor and anthologist for two ground-breaking science fiction anthologies, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972).
Harlan Ellison’s wikipedia page
Harlan Ellison’s Official website
Robert Silverberg is a prolific best selling American science fiction author. In his career spanning nearly six decades, he has written over eighty novels, five hundred short stories, seventy works of non-fiction, and has edited over one hundred anthology collections. His catalog has been translated into over forty languages.
Silverberg received his first Hugo award at the age of twenty-one for his first published novel Revolt in Alpha C (1956). In the proceeding years his work has won four more Hugo awards, to go along with nine Locus Poll awards, and five Nebula awards. He has also been nominated over forty more times.
Among his most notable works are his novella Nightwings (1969) winner of a Hugo and Prix Apollo and nominated for a Nebula award, the novel Tower of Glass (1970), nominated for Hugo, Nebula, Locus Poll, and Ditmar awards, Dying Inside (1972), also a Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Ditmar award nominee, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus poll nominated Book of Skulls (1971), and the best selling and award winning Majipoor series.
He also collaborated with Isaac Asimov on the novelization of three of Asimov’s prominent works— The Positronic Man (1992), from the 1976 novella The Bicentennial Man, Child of Time (1990), from the 1958 novella Lastborn, and Nightfall (1990), from the classic 1941 story of the same name.
He was inducted in the Science fiction hall of fame in 1999, and was named Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004.
Robert Silverberg’s wikipedia page
Robert Silverberg’s Official website
Andrew Thomas Sayre was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Hudson, New Hampshire. He attended Keene State College, where he received his BA in Film Production with a minor in Philosophy.
Before moving to Brooklyn, he called Boston his home for fourteen years and was active in the local film community, having created two short films of his own and been involved in many local film projects in various capacities.
His first feature length film Whatever Makes You Happy (2010), screened at several film festivals in 2011, notably winning best feature film at the 2011 Treasure Coast International Film Festival.
