DCFF ’12: Danville Filmmakers get Strange with ‘Bizarnival’

How do you fit tuxedos, a stop-motion robot, an airplane-piloting puppet and a homicidal mime into a twelve minute film? Having seen the thing myself I’m still not quite sure, but it was one hell of a brain-twisting frolic.

The latest from the feverish hive-mind of Danville, Kentucky filmmakers Todd Sheene, Allen Martin, and Scott Stafford, ‘Bizarnival– Tuxedos in the Attic’ is an experimental short that starts with a magical box in an attic and continues from there with an inordinate amount of meandering wonderment.

“We really wanted to take the audience to a lot of different places,” Scott Stafford said of ‘Bizarnaval’, which he described as surprisingly cohesive in spite of its intentionally helter-skelter narrative.

Stafford, along with partners Martin and Sheene (together known as Walk Softly Films), have been working as a team for ten years now, after a lifelong passion blossomed into a self-educated version of film school on the cheap. “The three of us have always had this love of storytelling,” said Stafford of the collaborative trio, who’ve collectively scribbled through stacks and stacks of notebooks worth of ideas.

The relatively quick production cycle of ‘Bizarnival’ was a huge change of pace for Walk Softly, who previously spent 8 to 9 years developing their first feature length ‘Cannonball’ as a labor of love. From notebook to finished product in just 3 weeks, this latest effort started as a a field test of some new equipment and techniques but ultimately transformed into something altogether different.

In addition to other projects in the works Walk Softly Films is currently producing a serialized, comedic web-series called ‘Space Cops’. Described as, “an epic series shot in the present, about the future, in a style of the past, ” the show is a bizarro-world take on ‘Starsky and Hutch’ about two intergalactic lawmen demoted to Earth-duty for reckless behavior. Check out the pilot episode of ‘Space Cops’ below and head over to Walk Softly‘s website for additional episodes and news:

A finalist for Best U.S. Short Film, ‘Bizarnival’ screens at the Derby City Film Festival as part of Shorts Group C on Saturday (Feb 18) at 4:00pm in the Eifler Theater. Full schedule and ticketing information available via DCFF’website.

LouisvilleKY.com wants to send you to Friday night’s screenings FOR FREE. Head over to LouKY‘s facebook page and comment on the Derby City Film Festival thread for a chance to be one of two winners to snag a pair of tickets. Deadline for entry is Thursday at noon, at which point the winners will be chosen at random from all of the commenters.

Check back later today for the second part of our ‘On the Radar’ Festival Preview, with a spotlight on a couple documentaries and international entries. And stay tuned as our series of filmmaker interviews continues throughout the week.

LouisvilleKY.com will also be covering DCFF over the weekend with live-blogging via twitter @CT_Smash.

More articles by me here.

Chris Ritter <<<< twitter.com/CT_Smash <<<< ctsmash@gmail.com