Welcome to the BBA-THE MOVIE website! HIGH-FIVE!
This project took about three years to complete. As one might have guessed, it was hard finding people to want to work for free on a movie with no script or plot outline. Everything (expect for my performance) was improvised. BBA’s music was all improvised, so I wanted the same thing here. I don’t really solve problems, I just find ways to work around them. So I created most of my actors instead of hiring them, using the most realistic sounding text-to-speech voices I could find to voice them. Which were also improvised.
The animation was done by my effects team "We Are Midget Robots", the team consists of me, myself, and I. Originally, the film was going to be completely animated in this “papermation” style. Paper cutouts, taped to popsicle sticks, with drawn backgrounds. But after realizing how horrible that looked, I switched to a more conventional animation style that still keeps the general idea of that essential paper look. The most important thing about the film was its look. That was the first thing I envisioned, even before writing the script(which actually came last). The animation was to be a counterpart to BBA’s music. I wanted it to represent and to basically mimic the music itself.
Some might consider you to be crazy to want to make a movie by yourself. But I think you kind of have to be a little crazy to want to work on a micro budgeted film anyway. The idea behind BBA: The Unsung Ballad of the Rise & Fall of the World’s Worst Band came to me while watching The Devil and Daniel Johnston. I liked the idea that it didn't matter how bad something was, (in this case music) it always seemed to find a following, be it 100 people or just one. I wondered if there was a documentary out there about a band that instead of having people talk about how great this band was, they just told you how much the band sucked. I kicked the idea around in my head for a few years til it hit me. Why not do a mockumentary about the worst band in the world? Take everything about rockumentaries and do the complete opposite. Plus, I already had the perfect band…
Black Bus America was always this inside joke between me and the other half of BBA, Bryan. If a band was bad, they automatically got compared to BBA. So it made perfect sense that the subject of the film be BBA and their fictional journey. Only problem with using BBA as my subject, is you gotta use it’s only two members. Which include myself and Bryan. Together we made some of the worst music you’ll ever hear, which years later, made for perfect cannon fodder to use in this film.
So I hope that sheds a little light on the process of how this film was made and possibly piqued some interest in wanting to see it.
