FEATURE: Bad is Bad - My first feature (with trailer!)

K

Kent OGP

Active member
(8/6/2011): The whole movie is now on Vimeo!



First off I want to thank everyone here, as I don't think there's anywhere else I could have gotten all the technical info I needed to pull this off. Thanks guys!

Bad is Bad is my first feature, made for a VERY small budget. We shot it over the summer in Richmond, VA. Here is the logline:
A locally loved suburban family man has to pay for the worst thing he's ever done when two mysterious young criminals break into his home.​


Trailer:



Website:
http://www.ohgoodproductions.com


You can also "like" us on Facebook.


More stuff coming soon!
 
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Some pics-

The core cast and crew of Bad is Bad
Back row - Adam (AC), Kevin (Actor/Producer), Chris(Actor/Producer/Writer), Ellis (Boom Op/Actor)
Front row - Neil (DP), Bill (Actor), Me (Director/Producer/Writer/Editor)
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The camera (7d)
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Our sound man Ellis, and a light fixture we kept up for all of our kitchen scenes. A lot of the movie takes place in the kitchen, and luckily we were able to set up a universal lighting scheme with this light and two powerful fluorescent lights placed outside the windows. We also had china balls set up in all of the rooms that were visible from the kitchen so they didn't look to dark. With this setup we were able to shoot in pretty much any direction in the kitchen without adjusting the lights, and keep a realistic look inside the house.
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Same thing but further back, plus our amazing DP Neil.
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Neil setting up another shot: a china ball up top and one of our fluorescents bouncing off the window shades, plus a reflector and a couple of tungsten lights.
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Chris and Kevin during a scene.
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Everybody getting ready for a day's shooting in the kitchen.
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Production Info:

Here is some production info that shows the movie being put together in chronological order, some of it is copied off my blog and some of it I'm writing for the first time here.

Summer 2009
We finished filming and editing our short film called "A-Wake" and still had another month or so left in our summer break. This short was a real learning experience, and we felt that we were finally ready to tackle a feature film, something we've wanted to do ever since we started making movies in middle school.

We spent a long time trying to think of an idea that would allow us to film a feature length movie that would take advantage of the resources we had available to us for free, so that the cost of the movie would be as low as possible. We eventually settled on a movie set in the suburbs involving a home break-in. Once we determined how we could put our own unique spin on the story, we started outlining the plot and developing the 3 main characters. By the time Chris (co-writer) and I left Richmond to go back to school at USC, we were ready to start typing up our first draft.

August and September 2009
After spending many hours in each others' rooms, the library, and study rooms, we finally finished our first draft of our first feature length script, which we thought was utterly brilliant. As weeks went on we slowly realized that this was not true at all, and started on the long process of revising the script.

October 2009 (from the blog)
So we have made a query letter for the movie, which is basically us pitching the script, to try to persuade people to read it. We will be sending our query letters out to 100 Hollywood production companies this week as a test run, and the vast majority of these will end up directly in the trash cans of those productions companies. However, hopefully a handful of people will be enticed by the query letter enough to request our script and read it.

Note - Man this was a total waste of time. Now that I'm interning at a production company I see tons of unsolicited submissions and NONE of them are looked at. We managed to get ONE person to read the script out of the 100 query letters we sent out. He liked it but couldn't buy it or help us out. Advice to all writers: Do not waste time with query letters! You have to have representation or know somebody.

Also, during this time we entered a couple of video contests and won prize money from both, which was a huge help in kick-starting the funding of the movie. I also had a part-time job, and most of my earnings were going straight into the movie fund. During the second semester of school, I got a better job, and Chris and Kevin (the other producers) also got jobs so we were able to make bigger contributions to the movie fund.

November 2009 (from the blog)
So we've decided that we will shoot a dramatic short film this winter break. This is going to be a very professionally made short. The scope of the story will be smaller than A-Wake, but one of the problems with A-Wake was that the story was too complex for 10 minutes anyway. This movie will be much simpler and more concise, and it should be very dramatically engaging.

We have many goals for this project, and many reasons for making it.

First off, we are entering another movie contest - The Southern California Business Film Festival. The only rules for this contest are that the movie has to be under 15 minutes and feature business as an important story element. There are prizes for best picture, screenplay, directing, acting, cinematography, incorporation of business, and more. If we can win in even one of these categories, the money will be a huge help to Bad is Bad.

Second, we can film this movie with most of the same equipment we will be using to shoot Bad. By winter break we will already have the camera that we'll be using for Bad, as well as the sound recorder. I'll have to rent the microphone I'm thinking of using, and I might rent a lens or two for the camera, but this short movie will give us a great opportunity to test out the camera and audio equipment on a serious production before our big feature.

Note -During this month we finished the script for this short which ended up being "The Big Idea", and we also bought the Canon 7d.

December 2009
Winter break began and we returned home to Richmond where we shot and edited "The Big Idea". This was the perfect time to learn how to use our new homemade dolly, audio equipment, and camera. We purposely shot it in the same house we knew we'd be filming most of Bad is Bad in, that way we got a feel for what worked with lighting/sound/dolly moves/etc. in that space.

We also attended a local Richmond theatre production of a play called Bus Stop, trying to find an actor to play the character of George. An actor in the play looked great for George, and it looked like he had the chops to pull it off. I talked to him after the show about acting in the movie, found out his name was Bill Brock and got his email address.

January 2010
Winter break ended and Chris and I went back to LA. We had kept revising the script and by this point we were working on draft 5 of Bad is Bad. We had a strict schedule of times to work on the movie 5 or 6 days a week (can't remember), and we were putting a LOT of time into it.

February 2010
"The Big Idea" got accepted into a business-themed film festival (which we wrote the movie for, hoping to win some prize money to help fund Bad). We finished a major draft of the script and began studying other films to get ideas for shot selections, as we were about to begin storyboarding. Some of the movies we watched for inspiration: No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, Funny Games, Shotgun Stories, A History of Violence, and Fargo.

After a lot of emails back and forth, Bill Brock signed on to play George. This was a huge relief, as now we finally had our 3 main characters cast.

"The Big Idea" won an award at the film festival that yielded us about $1000, and we also won a camera through a video contest that Best Buy was hosting. We put the grand into the movie fund and kept the camera, which we wound up using to film our behind the scenes footage with for Bad.

March 2009 (from the blog)
Chris and I spent our spring break slaving away storyboarding the movie. The process takes a long time, after seven full days of work we only have half the movie storyboarded, which is about 200 of chris's little drawings. They are great though, and I'm getting even more excited about this movie now that I know what it will look like on screen. Once we finish the rest we can start creating a rough schedule for production.
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In other news, the cast is almost complete. We only need two more actors who will be playing characters we can film in one day. We'll probably have to wait until we get back to Richmond, then hit up some local theatres to find these two.

April 2010 (from the blog)
After spending many weekends on storyboards, we finally finished last weekend. I think we have around 400 shots drawn for the whole movie (which is actually not much considering it's a 100 minute long movie). Now we're finally moving on to scheduling the shoot. The longest we can shoot is 3 weeks, starting June 12 and ending July 3. I'm hoping that we will finish faster than that, but I should have a better idea about that once we've scheduled the rest of the movie.

And in other news, Neil Grochmal has officially signed on as our director of photography! He'll be coming from Norfolk to light and shoot the movie. We're excited to have him on the team and see what he can bring to the film!

Note - finding our DP was huge, Neil found us through a Craigslist ad, and after some emails and phone talks he signed on. He proved to be a huge asset during the filming of the movie.



That's all for now! More to come...
 
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Thanks Homonculus! We used a 7d and got some great looking footage out of it even though it was mostly shot with wide lenses so we rarely used its shallow DOF capabilities.
 
forget the shallow DOF b.s. it's just a fad even hollywood barely uses it. great work.

quick question in that one shot in the bedroom where you're setting up the lights, there seems to be a china ball high in the ceiling above the guy's head. was that a china ball light the DP set up or was it just a practical fixture that was already in the room?
just curious what bulb did you have in there and where do you get your chinaballs if it was?

thanks!
 
That was pretty good! You guys have some really nice shots in there. I liek the premise too. Good job.
 
Our DP setup that China ball in the room. I believe he got it from Pier 1 Imports. I'm pretty sure we had several 60(ish) watt daylight color fluorescent bulbs in there.

Thanks jls4! Right now I'm submitting it to a bunch of film fests, a process which I really hate... hopefully we get in somewhere respectable though!
 
Good title, good poster, good trailer. I plan to follow this thread and look forward to hearing more and eventually watching the film.

It has shades of many films I like in it (and of one that scares the hell out of me). Though limited in what we see it seems like your lead bad guy has some talent. Liked his reaction shots and the way he delivered the dialogue.

Best of luck.
 
yea this one looks really good. really want to see the finished product. something very unique about this one
 
Thanks guys! Yea, this one is a little different, we leaned more towards the artistic side than we have in our past efforts. Lots of careful shot selections and editing choices. I was very fortunate in that I ended up having to make very few compromises during shooting and post, the movie is pretty much exactly as we wrote it. That's something that hasn't happened in many of my short films! The actual movie is also dryer than it may appear in the trailer, as we went for a very realistic approach with it.

I may upload a little behind the scenes footage later on...
 
From what was on the trailer, I was reminded of Funny Games and A History of Violence. It looks great. Cant wait to see the whole thing.
 
Thanks yellowcake, Funny Games was a big inspiration, as was A History of Violence (mainly the first scene of that movie). So far I've put the trailer up on trailerspy.com and in a day or two it will also be up on traileraddict.com. Hopefully I can drum up some more interest for the movie online.
 
In just one week we will be holding the premiere of Bad is Bad in a theater in Richmond, VA! If you live in the area, come to the Byrd Theater on December 19th at 2PM. Admission is only $1. For more info, check out our website (link in my sig). Very exciting!
 
Good news! I'm going to be putting the entire movie online within the week! It'll be free to watch in HD on Vimeo, keep an eye out for it here!
 
Great job guys, I really enjoyed it. Having a competent DP really shows. Great dialogue and great acting all around. Everything was planned out really well (looked like the shots were well storyboarded). The sound and picture were absolutely professional.

While it barely detracted from the movie, I noticed the tripod shook a bit during the action scenes because of loose floorboards. I only noticed because I've had this problem as well.

Can't wait to see what you guys do next.
 
Haven't had time to watch the entire thing...but I watched the first 10 minutes or so and I am very impressed with your composition and shot selection. I believe I read that you all are 20 or 21 years old. You should be extremely proud of yourselves for what you've accomplished at your age. Look forward to watching the whole film.
 
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