Shoot in a rural area where there are few cars. Shoot in an industrial area over the weekend (you may notice a lot of zombie movies take place in these two types of locations).

Get a film permit and get the cops to close down a road or two for a couple of hours.

Film on vacation days where people will be bbqing or watching the Superbowl or something.

Shoot so that you can matte in the background. That is your actors to the left and the cityscape to the right. THan you can take different shots of the city and edit out cars and movement to make it look barron and comp it into the shot. You might not even need greenscreen depending upon how you do it.

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA

Excellent suggestions, RJ.

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The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)

Thank you. I gave the problem a bit of thought myself.

One other thought is the concept of a webseries. Remember if you are really making your film for the web than things should be slightly different. If you intend to eventually put them on DVD than you should ignore these points. I'm talking specifically for webepisodes designed to draw attention to your work rather than something you might want to sell later.
+ Resolutions are gonna be less important which means CGI and cheap effects may be a lot easier to hide.
+ Audio syncing is often off in web movies. YOu want to do your best but if you do a lot of ADR because of car sounds it is far less likely to stand out.
+ Complex shots showing actors and backgrounds aren't gonna work as well. The background will be too indistinct a lot of the time. You're gonna want to play with close ups of the actors more so we can see them act, and then cut to a shot of the background to show what they are looking at instead. That will make it easier to time some of those shots to do it without cars and people.

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA

Me and a friend filmed a short zombie film, and because of the same problems you're having, we shot it in a rural area, which worked really nice. Besides having no interference with cars or anything, it also looked really desolate and lonely, which helped to really create the mood we were going for. Personally, I think the story is more important than the setting, if you have a good story, the setting will fit, wherever you choose to film it.

(We never finished the zombie film, titled Empty Horizon, as college started, and some of the cast were impossible to get a hold of).

Not sure whether this is a dead topic or not, just throwing in my two cents cause I've done alot of these.

What we did was paint my garage blue, then just blue screened any public shots/stunt shots in there and the rest at other locations. I don't know where you're from, but even with a film permit, you can get a little bit of hassle. Especially when your main toon is getting eaten alive in the middle of the road like a picnic.

Trust me, you'd rather not spend a some time in a jail cell with a couple of detoxing crack addicts and 3 friends still in makeup. It just isn't nice

That's it! You people have stood in my way long enough! I'm going to clown college!