Every festival needs a photo crew willing to chase seven-foot zombies across a park for the perfect shot, and Davis has had the same one for most of its run. On October 17, 2025, the festival's blog gave Matthew Strong of Action Flipbooks a title that stuck: Zombie Prime, "one of our longest-running legends."
Six years, one green screen
The post credits Strong with six years straight of the green screen photo booth and the 360-degree photobooth, plus "Matthew, Rick, and their crew of SpotMyPhoto roaming zombie photographers" haunting the park every year, with a specific shout-out to Lauren and Lily, "a true family affair." A green screen booth at Central Park is mentioned as far back as the Davis Enterprise's 2019 preview of the very first ride, which raises the possibility that the involvement actually started at year one rather than year two, a detail the festival's own six-year count has not fully pinned down.
The morning after that first event in 2019, Aaron Wedra emailed Matthew directly: "I should've been listing you as a major sponsor all along but my brain just didn't register that fact. You made the event so much more fun for so many people and the montage you sent yesterday is a great joy to watch!" It is the kind of note that explains why a business keeps showing up to the same free festival year after year.
The 360 booth, sponsored and re-sponsored
From 2023 through 2025, the 360 video booth carried its own branding, sponsored by Yolo County Supervisor Lucas Frerichs at a $1,000-plus level, with guests receiving SpotMyPhotos overlays labeled "Zombie Bike Ride V" (2023) and "Davis Zombie Ride VI" (2024), delivered by text message. Frerichs also brought the Toys for Tots Halloween Train to the festival for the first time in 2025. Whether he personally stepped into the booth himself in any of those years is not confirmed publicly, a small detail worth asking about before it becomes festival lore.
"You made the event so much more fun for so many people and the montage you sent yesterday is a great joy to watch." (Aaron Wedra, the morning after the first festival)
Part of the ecosystem, not the whole thing
Action Flipbooks now sits among the "Powered by" partners on the festival home page, alongside Hallmark Properties, the City of Davis and Visit Davis, and Matthew's own balloon-morning photography from the 2025 rescheduled hot-air balloon rides was credited directly on Instagram. The festival's photo ecosystem is bigger than any one photographer, though: Timothy Wilkinson has shot pro galleries since 2019, Stewart Savage once famously spotted Bigfoot in a festival crowd, Mootens Productions covers both photo and video, Jessi Davis shot roughly 500 balloon photos in 2025, and Rickie of Stimulate Photography covers the Zombie Ball. Organizers describe the 2025 haul as "nearly 1,000 shots," and the full gallery archive as "THOUSANDS of photos."
How the relationship actually works
Unlike most sponsors, who write a check and get a logo, Action Flipbooks' arrangement with the festival has always run on service rather than cash. In 2019 the green screen booth and highlight montage went out for free. By 2023 the business paid a modest sponsorship on top of its usual services and received the festival's top "Zombie Zinger" tier in return. In 2024 and 2025, the festival paid a heavily discounted flat fee, around $500 each year, for the 360 booth and SpotMyPhotos access, a fraction of what those services would normally cost a client. It is the kind of long-running, informal trade that only works between two organizations that trust each other, built one October at a time since before the festival even had a name for what Matthew Strong does. Roaming photographers, notably, have never been separately invoiced at all; they are simply part of what shows up every year, uncounted and unbilled.
What comes next
Heading into 2026, Aaron's planning notes ask Action Flipbooks to "elevate ONE thing," whether that is the website, AI, or new technology, while keeping the business at the top sponsorship tier regardless of what that one thing turns out to be. It is a small, honest ask: keep doing what works, and try one new thing on top of it. That is roughly the same approach the whole festival has taken since 2019.
If your business has a service like this to offer the festival for free or at a discount, reach out about sponsoring. If you would rather be behind the camera than in front of it, volunteer for the photo team.
