BZD Films

The first film out of 3 in our Trilogy!!

Watch the Latest From BZD Films!

This is a Soviet H1N1 propaganda film that explains the proper health protocol according to the best doctors out of the USSR.

(This film has been dubbed into English.)

This is the first of three films that we shot in Atlanta, GA at the beginning of Jan 2010. We spent 20 hours and $20 to make all of these films. We had a bare-bones crew that was 6 people at its largest.

Thanks to our amazing cast and crew!

• Director/Writer: Patrick Sutherland
• Co-Director/Co-Writer: Catherine R.N.B.M.X. Armbruster
• Set Dec and SFX: Alice Rose
• Actors: Cameron Stuart, Patrick Sutherland, and Catherine R.N.B.M.X. Armbruster
• Producer, Editor, Cinematography: Brian Z. Danin
• Art: Mikhail Ally

If you like the film, please comment on this post!

This letter appeared in my mailbox last week:

(click to enlarge)

In other, completely unrelated news, Brian and I have been making a lot of progress on the BZD Films Trilogy, which we filmed in “the the ground floor area, club room, and laundry room on morning of Saturday January 9, 2010″!

We’re nearly finished with “Flu in the USSR” and hope to have it released by the end of the month.

c@

Surprisingly, we managed to write three short scripts, have 3 short pre-productions meetings and borrow, beg and steal (well, only figuratively steal) ourselves enough equipment and actors to make the trilogy with a skeleton cast and crew of 5 core members and 1 additional sound person (thanks Mikhail!!!!) to shoot the scripts.

Diligent Work Paid Off!

After a grueling 24 hour period with only 4 hours for sleep (that’s 20 hours of solid production), we finished out three scripts and actually came through the entire debacle unscathed by technical glitches or any other major hurdles.

Catherine’s Incredible Recovery

On a side note, exactly one month prior to the day we filmed this (1/9), Catherine was still unconscious in the ICU. Take that, adversity!

Herpenis Production Stills:

(This is a working title for the slapstick herpes commercial)

BZD Production Crew

“Herpenis” Infomercial Comedy (written by Cat RNBMX Armbruster, with Patrick Sutherland)

Russian H1N1 PSA Production Stills:

“Russian H1N1 PSA” Still  (written by Patrick Sutherland, with Cat RNBMX Armbruster)

DogHouse Production Stills:

“DogHouse” Production Still (written by Brian Z. Danin)

Back in October, we planned to undertake a very important project in January 2010 to kick off the new decade. The film, Tomato Tomato (or Tomato^2 as I like to call it) was a fantastically funny film about a clown getting hit by a car. While I was initially excited to film the script, written by BZD Films’ very own authors Catherine RNBMX Armbruster and Patrick Sutherland, I thought the better of doing the project, predicting bad weather in Atlanta. As we all know well by now, the snow and frost that has fallen on Atlanta over the last week proved my fears correct, and the last thing we would have wanted to do would spend an entire cold and icy day in a car and covering some poor clown in a pool of blood.

The New Plan:

So, I vetoed the script back in November, and started writing a new script, based on a story by Miranda July. That script, called “Swimming Lessons” was also bound to be a box-office smash, hit earning thousands of fake dollars for our enterprise. BUT, my film crew wasn’t as keen as myself on that script, and it did require an underwater housing for my camera, 3 old people (in their 70’s), and a few hard to attain locations. And off to the chopping block went that script as well.

The BZD Trilogy is Born!

Patrick, Bleary-Eyed from Writing

So, as of last week, we were stuck, scriptless, and mostly idealess (not to mention Cat’s brain was still stuck in Mush-Soup-Land due to a near-fatal bike smash disaster a couple weeks prior where a white SUV decided that driving on Catherine’s head was a more appropriate venue than the road), but not to be detoured. If the first two didn’t succeed, what we needed was three more!
There we were, the three of us, Cat RNBMX A., Patrick, and myself. We each took it upon ourselves to write one script each, and decided that we would go at it, full force filming the BZD 2010 kick-off trilogy in a 24 hour period. It would be like a contest, where our only competition is time, ourselves, and technology.

Location Scouting

Alright, we know that we promised a final and ready-for-viewing cut of Alley Cats by the end of 2009. That, quite obviously has not occurred, and there are many reasons as to why. Here I will go over just a couple.
First, I would like to congratulate the fortunate Director, Cat RNBMX A. for defeating the motorized death-mobile that tried to prove it was stronger than a bicycle. If a violent run-in with a car isn’t a good reason for a major delay in finishing and distributing a film, then I suppose I don’t know what a good excuse would be.

(For posterity, here is a NEW trailer, which I hope stokes excitement.)

Furthermore, we had legitimate technical issues. I’m not the type to complain about computer issues publicly, but this was my first hard drive failure in my 10 years of film production, which is a pretty remarkable track record considering I have more than 10 drives, some of which have been clunking along for about the same amount of time I’ve been involved in this trade. The drive that died happened to be the drive I had just dedicated to the Alley Cats production, and we were lucky that we didn’t lose our irreplaceable and very difficult to attain RED One footage. The other footage we lost was easily re-imported from the original HDV tapes, and the only thing we lost was our fun sound effects we used for the trailer. However, both aforementioned recoveries have severely damaged the projects already feeble time-line.

That said, we still plan to finish the film by some undisclosed future date. Until then, we do have a few exciting developments coming forward (just read the later posted material on this site for more info on the BZD Films exciting, thrilling, and at times unbelievable progress towards a revolutionary and overly-wordy future …)