lastdaysjournal.com

in 2007 chad wrote the pilot for a post-apocalyptic episodic he called “last days“. it was the gritty, day-by-day story of survivors of a horrifying pandemic that is transferred by violence and turns those killed by it into man-eating undead monsters (think 28 Days Later meets The Wire). at the time, Heroes was about to begin it’s second season – so the concept of a zombie TV show wasn’t completely crazy – but The Walking Dead was still just a comic book – so it wasn’t so commonplace either.

so one day chad dreamed up lastdaysjournal.com, a place where regular people could pretend the world had ended and “blog” about how they were trying to survive. with little-to-no web experience at the time, chad taught himself how to install Drupal and just ran with it.

to help launch the site, superfreako productions produced one of their very first pieces (written and shot by denny), a piece that was supposedly a clip take from the border California-Mexico border by some Minute Men who encountered a zombie and its prey. over the next several months, superfreako productions as well as several lastdaysjournal users posted videos of their own.

within a month of it’s launch, lastdaysjournal was averaging 120-150 uniques per day, occasionally spiking between 200 to 500 uniques. all through the first half of 2008, that amount of traffic kept up (1st half ’08: 17,569 visits, 20.06% bounce rate, 14.5 pages per viste and 16:58 minutes average on site) as people from Australia, the UK, all through the US and even some apparent ex-pats (or perhaps the children of ex-pats) were signing up, creating an alter ego – sometimes more than one – and “working” together to fight off zombies in a text-based playground.

chad has since created a pretty intricate blueprint for an evolved version of the site, but hasn’t yet been able to gather the resources for its implementation. plans and scripts for the episodic continue to evolve and a motion comic prequel is scheduled for completion by last summer / fall 2011. the site itself will most likely under go a reboot of sorts in spring 2011 and will continue to evolve over time.

feel free to follow the progress of lastdaysjournal and several other superfreako productions projects on blogreako.com, the on-going real life story of superfreako productions.