GameZombie helps student Web production become reality

What began as a small team of video-game enthusiasts has now become an immense Web site production team made up of nearly 80 members, said graduate student Andrew Benninghoff, executive creative director at GameZombie.tv.

The site, which is also a student organization, originated from then-IU graduate student Spencer Striker’s project thesis, Benninghoff said.

“It started off just being a Web site about a couple of guys who were in this narrative of a zombie apocalypse,” he said. “He and his friends would gather all the video games they had and hide in a video studio bunker and spend the rest of their lives broadcasting video game information through the TV to whoever may be alive.”

As Striker finished up the master’s program, Benninghoff said the site, which includes video game-related short film series, interviews and news, began to grow.

Now, the site has expanded to include teams made up of students and employees at IU and the University of Wisconsin, as well as a small management group in Los Angeles, Benninghoff said.

The IU team, led by Benninghoff, is broken up into three sections: business, Web development and production. The team meets twice a week in IU classrooms to work on projects and discuss work to be done throughout the week, Benninghoff said.

“Since it’s mostly student -run, we’re allowed to reserve rooms,” he said. “We’re allowed to reserve rooms with all of the computers and multimedia programs we need.”

Besides the two meetings each week, Benninghoff said most students do their work for the site at home. When it comes to production, he said the process could take place anywhere — a studio, a street downtown or  someone’s apartment.

“Since we’re a Web site, we can function pretty much anywhere,” he said.
Junior Lillian Feldman-Hill said she gets most of her work for the site done at the weekly meetings.

“Most of my work gets done on GameZombie time,” she said. “I can’t do it at home because I do all the edits on expensive software. There’s a lot of business that goes on at the meetings also; it’s not just people sitting at their computers ignoring each other.”

As a video “speed editor” for GameZombie, Feldman-Hill said she takes the B-roll video footage that the field team produces and edits it into a two- or three-minute interview or news story. Often, Feldman-Hill said she receives projects that do not have a lot of B-roll footage and provide her a challenge editing them.

“It usually takes me a week or a week and a half to do a three-and-a-half minute interview,” she said. “I want to do editing professionally, so I tend to take it seriously.”

Feldman-Hill said the two most important things for a telecommunications student trying to break into the film industry are networking opportunities and a student’s reel of work.

“I can give employees my reel that has 10 or 12 videos already that have been approved by people that know what they’re talking about,” she said. “But reel is the second most important. Who you know is the single most important thing. The people I’m meeting, networking and the friendships that I’m making are beneficial in professional and nonprofessional ways.”

Graduate student Casey Addy, lead web designer and user experience designer at GameZombie.tv, said other companies see the work that he does at the site as effective.

“Gaming is popular,” he said. “And we’re able to utilize what’s popular. When people put their love and their whole soul into what they work on, it showcases their love for the company.”