Juniors Aditya Ashok and Evan Sorlien sit in chairs in front of the fold-out desk in Ashok’s room, squinting at the two computer screens. The speakers bellow gritty, pulsing music and the scene fades to black.

"I don’t know dude," Sorlien says, leaning forward and pressing his hands together against his lower lip. "I think we need more sound effects right there." He points to the screen with his eyebrows, and his cheeks flush.

Ashok nods, clicks the mouse and replays the scene. Machine guns fire, the camera shakes, and a tangerine sun sets behind the Ashland mountainside. Two soldiers stand face to face in the wilderness, one of them with a gun to the other’s head.

"Yeah, I still don’t like the sound of the gunshots before that," Ashok says as the scene plays on. He leans back and adjusts his T-shirt. "They need a lot of work. I don’t know though," he says. "I’ve watched this thing so many times I can’t tell if it’s good anymore."

And audiences will say if it’s good or not this week. After almost a year since its conception, the two video production majors have set a date to screen their zombie flick, "Valley of the Dead" for fellow students to enjoy.

In the beginning stages of the project, the two wrestled with the idea of directing a dark film about drug use, but they ultimately decided to make their first team project a bit more fun. The zombies won out, and "Valley of the Dead" was born.

The movie takes place in the year 2015, a few years after a zombie outbreak. Lieutenant Drake Morris, one of the central characters, steals something vital to the survival of mankind. A containment unit of soldiers has been ordered blindly to find Morris, unsure of what they’ll find when and if they do.

And while the movie centralizes around the living dead, both student-directors insist the movie digs into deeper themes than most horror flicks do.

"There aren’t any heads exploding or anything like that," Ashok says. "It’s in a zombie setting, but the main story revolves around character development and human nature."

"Valley of the Dead" combines the color tone of Ashok’s favorite film "Apocalypse Now" with the camera techniques director Peter Berg uses in Sorlien’s favorite movie "Friday Night Lights." Sorlien says Berg’s hand-held style and quick zoom helps convey a sense of drama without overdoing the writing or the acting.

"A lot of people think zombie movies are cheesy and that’s why we wanted to do something different with ours," Sorlien says.

But the movie could have been ruined. Over the summer, months after wrapping up production, Ashok’s external hard drive crashed, and he lost over 50,000 songs and sound effects he had been collecting for the movie’s soundtrack, along with four years of other film projects.

"It was like a magician losing all of his tricks," he says.

He spent the next three days without sleep, Ashok says, trying to recover his bag o’ tricks. No luck. The hard drive still lies on a desk in his parents’ house, stowing away precious sound bites.

Each have moved on to solo projects but are still involved in each other’s work to a small degree.

"We’ve found that it’s better to work together, to have an alliance," Sorlien says. "That way we cover all of our bases."

"Valley of the Dead" will screen Friday, March 14 at 7 p.m. in the Meese Auditorium of the Art Building. Admission is free for students and the public.