BIG BAD WOLVES - an award winning new comedy/horror short film!

[poe]

BIG BAD WOLVES

(13 min) (Black Comedy/Horror/Fantasy)

A mash-up between Quentin Tarantino and The Brothers Grimm, fairy-tales will never be the same again....

I just wanted to let everyone know that after two years of doing the festival circuits and television airplay, my 13-minute long, award-winning, short film entitled "BIG BAD WOLVES" is officially online!

"BIG BAD WOLVES" depicts a conversation between five mobsters, passing the time drinking and smoking in a restaurant, which slowly leads to one of the gangsters suggesting that the story of Little Red Riding Hood is actually about the importance of sex education (in the same way Quentin Tarantino's character in "Reservoir Dogs" suggests that the Madonna song "Like a Virgin" is about a particularly violent sexual encounter).

The other mobsters think he's out of his mind, so the narrating mobster begins to re-tell the story as he believes it originally existed, before it was "censored" and "cleansed" for young children.

What follows is a dark journey into the mythology, fantasy and the heart of the human psyche, where pure evil lurks and waits to rob us all of our innocence.

"BIG BAD WOLVES" is a hilarious and disturbing experience that will have you alternating between laugh-out-loud comedy and thought-provoking questions on morality and the fabrics of our own society.

The film was shot in 2005 and released to festivals in 2006. It costed approximately $10,000US and was shot on Mini-DV format on the Sony DSR-300s series (sorry DVX users, we didn't have access to the excellent Panasonic range at the time).

It was shot entirely on location in Auckland, New Zealand.

Among its prominent awards were nabbing the "BEST DIRECTOR" award at the Ohakune Big Mountain Film Festival in 2006 and "MOST PROMISING FILMMAKER" at the Rotorua Magma Film Festival.

This movie has been rated in New Zealand as R16 - contains excessive offensive language, horror violence and brief nudity. Viewer discretion is strongly advised.


WATCH THE TRAILER:

Low Resolution (YouTube)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wexv-HtjFE8



WATCH THE FILM:

Medium Resolution (Facebook)
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=11163180989

High Resolution (Vimeo - streaming and downloadable DIVX version)
http://www.vimeo.com/769224




Enjoy and feel free to post any responses, critiques and questions about the production process!

I made the film a while ago, but still remember a lot about the production and post workflow!

Thanks!

 

[Eric Piccoli]

Good job man,

on what was it shot? It looks really neat!


Opening credits are really visually good! The actors are great but the main one, the one tellign the story is amazing man.

Keep up the good work, no doubt this made a lot of festivals.

 

[poe]

Thanks very much Eric,

The film was shot on the SONY DSR-300 series (the 350 and the 370 respectively - production and rental problems saw us swapping the camera model out every other day and - thus - shooting on Mini-DV or DVCAM every other day).

Fitted to the glass was DV wide-angle diopter and we also had a DV zoom lens which was used extensively.

Wherever possible, we used the zoom (combined with smoke machines and strong BG/FG contrast lighting to enhance the DOF which the camera would not natively see or capture).

We only swapped out for the wide when it was totally neccessary and it shows how useless the wide is for creating DOF (the gangsters in the diner were never shot on the wide-angle).

Our D.O.P's lighting philosophy was to light for heightened mood (fantasy, film noir and horror respectively) and push the contrast across the set and focus plane to create artificial DOF.

The entire film was color-graded on the Baselight System and mastered onto Digi-Beta format.

The film's acquisition format was DV and DVCAM, so we missed the HD boat by about 6 months here in New Zealand. It was shot on 4:3 aspect ratio and then cropped to 16:9 due to the limitations of the cameras and how they processed PAL signal lines. Shooting at 4:3 ensured that we would get the cleanest and most workable base image without sacrificing color resolution and it wasn't as if we were losing lines of information anyways.

You can catch more behind the scenes images on the "BIG BAD WOLVES" Facebook page which is here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Big-Bad-Wolves/8323699633

Hope this helps and thanks so much for the comments! Would love to hear more critiques and suggestions by other users!

 

[Michael Anthony Horrigan]

Great work. I loved the way that the story was told. Kept me interested throughout.

There were audio issues during some of the dialogue but nothing too bad.

Very good work!

Cheers,

Mike

 

[Huy Vu]

Brilliantly written and told. Love it. I noticed the audio issue as well, some of the background sound doesn't match from shot to shot, but in all a great film.

 

[tmnt]

I really liked how you directed the around the table scene. You moved the camera about nicely to get a real filmic kinda feel. Liked the color grading in that scene too. Nice work!

 

[poe]

Thanks very much guys! The audio issues were created due to having two different sound ops on two different days - one of them very talented, the other still learning their craft. The total result was a mixed bag of audio, plus the audio mix was done by a third party whom were not entirely stellar at doing their jobs.

We have learnt a lot from that experience and have made sure we will never skimp on the audio department ever again!