'History In The Valley' Made With Local Help
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By David [email protected]
Over a period of 12 days, spread out over a period of about four weeks in September, filmmaker Brent Kado shot his movie “A Short History in the Valley” in Warsaw, North Webster and Goshen. It’s a story of three small-town bumbling criminals and their journey to try and obtain some illegal merchandise.
The main character in the dark comedy is Vinny. “He pictures himself as an up-and-coming gangster, but he’s not really quite competent enough to pull it off,” Kado explained.
His two lackeys, Duke and Castro, aren’t criminals but they get swept up in the action in an effort to make a quick buck and do Vinny a favor. But it all goes terribly wrong.
There’s also Bunny, Vinny’s girlfriend. She’s a small town girl living in a lonely world who is struggling to find her way. “Through Vinny she finds some security, adventure, her version of what maybe love looks like,” Kado explained.
“All the characters are sort of roaming souls looking to make it in their daily Midwestern existence,” he said.
There’s a radio disc jockey who is intercut into the film. He is sort of an omniscient voice of the town, the grandfather figure “that speaks about the town to the town with the town.” On his show, he interviews the notable people of the town.
The time period is supposed to be sort of timeless, Kado said, but there are references, vehicles and cell phones that may be five to 10 years old. “I wanted to sort of capture that idea that you can go to a lot of places like ... North Webster on a Tuesday afternoon like this and walk around and besides a few things, it may not look much different than it did 10 years ago,” he explained. “I wanted to try and capture that town as a character, slow moving and a little behind.”
At the onset, the movie starts out in the Depression era, and ends in the same time. “It starts off with a couple of bumbling criminals trying to make something happen. Their journey on that is sort of like a flashback from what is happening in the main chunk of the story with Vinny, Duke and Castro,” he said.
As for the main cast and crew of the film, Kado said they all came in from Chicago. The shooting was spread out over four weeks so the cast and crew could get back to their day jobs as needed. The breaks also gave Kado a break from shooting so he could look at the footage shot and realize what might need to be reshot or picked up the second time around.
“One of the toughest things about shooting low-budget independent do-it-yourself kind of movies is that time can kind of be your biggest enemy. A budget is nice, too, but if you’re able to improvise and throw things together like I’ve been able to do, time just becomes a real asking of people to give their time to shoot something. If the movie was a budgeted movie and shot properly instead of being 12 days, it would have been 21 days with days off inbetween for people to have free time,” Kado explained.
His main plan for the movie is to just get it edited down and hopefully either find a small distributor to pick it up or to self-distribute it. Most movies have a marketing budget that is at least 50 percent of what the shooting budget was, he said, so having “Short History” picked up by someone would be beneficial for marketing purposes.
“The thing would be to have this so people can see it and finance another movie because I definitely see, in a lot of ways, this film as part of a larger opus of films where there is multiple storylines in this one small town,” he said. “I don’t have anything written but I definitely have some solid ideas for some other similar scripts and films that I could shoot on my own.”
Kado has made other movies before, but he also would like to use this one to show people what he can do, what he wants to do next, and get someone to throw some money behind his next film.
He said he has no strong idea of when the film will be finished and he’s not putting a lot of pressure on himself to get it finished by a certain date. Once it is complete, however, he will show it locally like he has his films in the past. Showing it locally will give the local actors and crew who worked on the film an opportunity to see it.
“If the life of the film changes because it doesn’t get ... any sort of distribution and I decide to do it myself, I’ll probably show it 10 times within northern Indiana because I want people to see it and I’m in charge of that so I would show it in Fort Wayne, Warsaw, Goshen, South Bend and all that. If someone else is in charge of it, then I might just show it one place so everyone can come and see it,” he said.
Kado said the film was made possible by local support.
“I was and have been once again really impressed with the community’s help and support from even just the one thing from someone hearing we needed a prop and dropping that off ... to people who let us in a pinch use their property to shoot something in a day’s notice,” he stated. “One of the reasons we shot our previous two films around here was that we knew that.”
Kado grew up in Elkhart and graduated from Concord High School. He earned his undergraduate degree from Ball State University. In 2001, he moved to Chicago and lived there 12 years. In 2007, he and his wife, Jessica Hardy, shot their first feature length film.
“Short History” is their third film, but Kado and Hardy also have made two short films. Kado has shot web series, live music videos and he’s “deep” in post production of a documentary.
They’ve been living in North Webster, but are moving to Los Angeles, Calif., at the end of this month, and they’re taking “Short History” with them.
“I feel that opens up a whole new way for it to be seen by people and get it in their hands for distribution or financing for our next film,” Kado said.
Kado’s and Hardy’s film production company is FlowFeel Films. The website is flowfeelfilms.com, and they also have a Facebook page and a Twitter account.[[In-content Ad]]
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Over a period of 12 days, spread out over a period of about four weeks in September, filmmaker Brent Kado shot his movie “A Short History in the Valley” in Warsaw, North Webster and Goshen. It’s a story of three small-town bumbling criminals and their journey to try and obtain some illegal merchandise.
The main character in the dark comedy is Vinny. “He pictures himself as an up-and-coming gangster, but he’s not really quite competent enough to pull it off,” Kado explained.
His two lackeys, Duke and Castro, aren’t criminals but they get swept up in the action in an effort to make a quick buck and do Vinny a favor. But it all goes terribly wrong.
There’s also Bunny, Vinny’s girlfriend. She’s a small town girl living in a lonely world who is struggling to find her way. “Through Vinny she finds some security, adventure, her version of what maybe love looks like,” Kado explained.
“All the characters are sort of roaming souls looking to make it in their daily Midwestern existence,” he said.
There’s a radio disc jockey who is intercut into the film. He is sort of an omniscient voice of the town, the grandfather figure “that speaks about the town to the town with the town.” On his show, he interviews the notable people of the town.
The time period is supposed to be sort of timeless, Kado said, but there are references, vehicles and cell phones that may be five to 10 years old. “I wanted to sort of capture that idea that you can go to a lot of places like ... North Webster on a Tuesday afternoon like this and walk around and besides a few things, it may not look much different than it did 10 years ago,” he explained. “I wanted to try and capture that town as a character, slow moving and a little behind.”
At the onset, the movie starts out in the Depression era, and ends in the same time. “It starts off with a couple of bumbling criminals trying to make something happen. Their journey on that is sort of like a flashback from what is happening in the main chunk of the story with Vinny, Duke and Castro,” he said.
As for the main cast and crew of the film, Kado said they all came in from Chicago. The shooting was spread out over four weeks so the cast and crew could get back to their day jobs as needed. The breaks also gave Kado a break from shooting so he could look at the footage shot and realize what might need to be reshot or picked up the second time around.
“One of the toughest things about shooting low-budget independent do-it-yourself kind of movies is that time can kind of be your biggest enemy. A budget is nice, too, but if you’re able to improvise and throw things together like I’ve been able to do, time just becomes a real asking of people to give their time to shoot something. If the movie was a budgeted movie and shot properly instead of being 12 days, it would have been 21 days with days off inbetween for people to have free time,” Kado explained.
His main plan for the movie is to just get it edited down and hopefully either find a small distributor to pick it up or to self-distribute it. Most movies have a marketing budget that is at least 50 percent of what the shooting budget was, he said, so having “Short History” picked up by someone would be beneficial for marketing purposes.
“The thing would be to have this so people can see it and finance another movie because I definitely see, in a lot of ways, this film as part of a larger opus of films where there is multiple storylines in this one small town,” he said. “I don’t have anything written but I definitely have some solid ideas for some other similar scripts and films that I could shoot on my own.”
Kado has made other movies before, but he also would like to use this one to show people what he can do, what he wants to do next, and get someone to throw some money behind his next film.
He said he has no strong idea of when the film will be finished and he’s not putting a lot of pressure on himself to get it finished by a certain date. Once it is complete, however, he will show it locally like he has his films in the past. Showing it locally will give the local actors and crew who worked on the film an opportunity to see it.
“If the life of the film changes because it doesn’t get ... any sort of distribution and I decide to do it myself, I’ll probably show it 10 times within northern Indiana because I want people to see it and I’m in charge of that so I would show it in Fort Wayne, Warsaw, Goshen, South Bend and all that. If someone else is in charge of it, then I might just show it one place so everyone can come and see it,” he said.
Kado said the film was made possible by local support.
“I was and have been once again really impressed with the community’s help and support from even just the one thing from someone hearing we needed a prop and dropping that off ... to people who let us in a pinch use their property to shoot something in a day’s notice,” he stated. “One of the reasons we shot our previous two films around here was that we knew that.”
Kado grew up in Elkhart and graduated from Concord High School. He earned his undergraduate degree from Ball State University. In 2001, he moved to Chicago and lived there 12 years. In 2007, he and his wife, Jessica Hardy, shot their first feature length film.
“Short History” is their third film, but Kado and Hardy also have made two short films. Kado has shot web series, live music videos and he’s “deep” in post production of a documentary.
They’ve been living in North Webster, but are moving to Los Angeles, Calif., at the end of this month, and they’re taking “Short History” with them.
“I feel that opens up a whole new way for it to be seen by people and get it in their hands for distribution or financing for our next film,” Kado said.
Kado’s and Hardy’s film production company is FlowFeel Films. The website is flowfeelfilms.com, and they also have a Facebook page and a Twitter account.[[In-content Ad]]
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