Welcome to the “Meet the Director” series of interviews featuring local filmmakers that are screening their works at “Get Connected“. “Batman – The Dark Truth” will be screening at the January, 2012 event. The mission of Get Connected is to build an industry family, help people gain employment, meet and network with great people, all while having a great time!
Batman – The Dark Truth - RSVP
Genre: Spoof
Directors: The Bontrager Twins
Length: 7 min
Some superhero’s have a bigger secret then their identity.
So “Batman – The Darker Truth” is screening at “Get Connected” – what do you gain from the experience?
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We finished this film in November and we’ve been waiting for a good opportunity to premier it. A lot of people have been asking about this one so we can’t wait to see the response we will get.
What is your background in the industry?
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Our background is motion graphics and trade show graphics/videos. My brother Dewayne and I started making short films 5 years ago for the 48 hour film project. We are self-taught film makers/special effects creators, so we are always pushing ourselves into challenging scenarios to learn new things.
How did you come up with the idea?
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A young film crew was raising money on Kickstarter.com for a Batman costume. We offered them my elaborate Halloween costume and sent them a fun 30 sec. video. They turned it down, so we decided to make our own Batman spoof. I thought it would be funny to find out that a dwarf was the hidden hero behind Batman. However, with the lack of finding a dwarf, we rewrote it to have a young boy as the hero. We also wanted to experiment with doing a mocurentory and get back to what we enjoy doing the most – comedy.
Tell us about your cast and crew!
I’m no actor but I was forced to play Batman since the costume was made to fit me. This left an opening for a camera operator. A great photographer, Terri Coward stepped in with great dedication. Actors from our past movies donated time with last minute calls – Ana Martinez, David Ludwig, and Jane Huskey. My buddy Dave Adam has been doing an old-man impression for years and I’ve always wanted to use this character in one of our films. Steve Franks pulled off anotheramazing original score for our movie. We were also lucky to find Ethan Major (with the help of Creative Studios of Atlanta) as the sidekick. He had the exact look we were looking for. With this great crew, we were able to write,shoot,and edit the majority of the film in two days.
What do you think audiences will enjoy about your film?
We hope they appreciate our sense of humor. But we really think the audience will like the special effectswe placed in the film. We’ve been looking for a movie to show off our capabilities. What’s better than asuper hero movie?
Any war stories from the set?
This movie was made for the “National Film Challenge” and had to be complete within 48hrs. We had 3 hours before our deadline and we asked for an 8yr old actorto come back and redo some lines. As bad luck would have it, he accidentally rolled back in a desk chair, knocking out an SD card and proceeded to roll over it. This card had vital video still on it. We sent what we had finished thus far and called it a day. It was no big deal, since we don’t really do the movies to compete. We do them to get us off our butts to make another movie.
Any tips you can share with others about the production process?
During a 48hr competition, don’t sweat the little stuff. Worry more about the overall story being told before tweaking it. We made that mistake on this film. We have since had time to correct and improve it but one things for sure, we didn’t loose any sleep wondering if we were going to win anything.
