Nicolas Entel Red Creek
When Nicolás Entel, showrunner of the series, S.O.Z. Soldados o Zombies (8×30′), co-produced by Dynamo and Red Creek for Amazon Prime Video, realizes all the way the project went through to get to where it is now, he is surprised.
“When I look back and see the genesis of the project, it has a similar history to those experienced by American ideas and scripts, but from Latin America,” explains Entel, who is a founding partner of Red Creek.
S.O.Z. Soldados o Zombies was written by Entel many years ago and as it was a “risky, novel and counterintuitive story for Latin America” there was a lot of interest from networks, platforms, and commissioners. MTV and YouTube had – at different times – the rights to do it, but it was never undertaken until Amazon stepped in and then Dynamo joined as a co-producer.
According to Entel, it was a difficult production for several reasons, including the location, the state of Durango in Mexico, since the series is set in the desert and on the border- where they had to take all the equipment, technicians, costumes, props and talent from Mexico City which increased the cost- and because of the ambitiousness of the project in special effects and action scenes with a budget, which although was fine for Latin America, it amount for a fraction of one from the United States.
“Americans make Fear of the Walking Dead also in Mexico, with the same costs, but with much more money and taking much more time. We in Latin America, with all our vehemence, have one week per episode. But they have twice as much time,” he said. He indicated that production took 10 weeks: eight in Durango on location and two in Mexico City, mostly in the studio.
He highlighted as positive that post-production costs have dropped dramatically in the last decade. “It was possible to do with Ollin VFX from Mexico some effects like those you can see in the series, such as creating completely digital zombie animals.”
Although it is still too early for Entel to show results of the performance of the series collected by Amazon – he said it takes a month for platforms to share figures with producers – there has been excellent receptivity among Mexican media and on social networks. “What has me most pleasantly surprised is that, a series that is a bit crazy, that has narcos, zombies, speaks badly about the American, winks at the middle class and that it would have been very easy to dislike the press, but the Mexican press is treating us very well, they understood all the winks, jokes and subplots.”
