Revellers crusted with unspeakable grime and smeared with their last meal stumble across a Herefordshire field towards the main stage at the Big Chill festival on a scorching August afternoon.

A normal scene at a music festival where many campers have taken to drinking with their breakfast baps and reduced their hygiene regime to a daily wet-wipe? Actually, these grizzly characters are zombies, shambling towards a film scene to play audience members in a Takeshi’s Castle style obstacle course for humans called "The Running Feast".

The event, which roped-in thousands of Big Chillers as zombie extras, had dual aims; firstly and as an aside, to break the world record for the largest zombie gathering – and it entered the Guinness Book of World Records with an official tally of 4,026. Secondly and fundamentally, the scene was the centrepiece of a mockumentary by Film4 and Warp Films called I
Spit on Your Rave, an ambitious concept, and just as much of a punt.

In recent years the live music scene has boomed, and keen for a more direct relationship with cinema audiences, Peter Carlton, Senior Commissioning Executive at Film4 wondered, “What’s the correlation with film? Perhaps it needs to go back to the early days when it was sort of travelling cinema circus, when it felt like there was a magic to it." So employing the Big Chill as film set, Film4 collaborated with the production company Warp Films to make a movie incorporating part of its potential audience.

The result is set in a dystopian future where a virus released at the 2012 Olympics has rendered almost the whole of humanity un-dead and designated any remaining humans as livestock. These zombie citizens still appreciate a party and so stage a summer festival, where the documentary is made. The main event, “The Running Feast” is presided over by the zombie king, played by Noel Fielding, of The Mighty Boosh fame, who says things like “bow down and kiss my rancid feet.” It fits nicely into the cannon of light-hearted zombie romps that extends from Michael Jackson’s Thriller video to Shaun of the Dead.

At the end of the Big Chill, a clip of the Running Feast scene, which will be expanded into a feature film with smaller scenes, was played to the festivalgoers. Most loved the clip and the experience of being part of a film, as one zombie bride put it, “I’m never going to be on TV but now I’m in a film.”

In this vein, Chris Boyle, director and co-writer, thinks involving a large portion of your potential audience can only be a good thing for the end product, “You’ve already got a base of people who know what you’re doing and I think gives them a sense of ownership.”

That is not to say he found it easy to shoot a plotted film as if it were a documentary. They cherry-picked the best extras for the front row, but all were unpaid amateurs who could leave if they were bored: “They had to be entertained. So we did the whole thing as a live show.” Further, the festival was not a film set so they had to make do with existing lighting - luckily “the whole thing just glows like a Christmas tree at night,” and instead of driving vans of equipment and staff around, they had to weave through “swathes of hammered festival goers” in motorised buggies. Most importantly, with so many human and technical variables the whole project relied on flexibility, something Chris feels they maintained.

Hopefully it will result in a creation as imaginative as Film4’s other experiment at the Big Chill. Dereliction Dive-In was a cinema set in Boyle’s post-apocalyptic dystopia, where festivalgoers sat in burned-out cars to watch films projected on to the side of an abandoned lorry, while smouldering trees wafted smoke across the scene. Whatever the final cut of I Spit on Your Rave, with his hazy cars and his dynamic director, Carlton succeeded in conjuring his magical cinema circus for one August weekend.

Find out more at www.ispitonyourrave.com

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