Greyscale Blog

Saturday, October 4th

Our second day at Tulsa Bible Church proved to be the longest day of the first leg of production at fourteen and a half hours.  It definitely put our crew to the test, biting off almost 9 pages of the script, but we also were working with one of Tulsa’s best known and beloved actors: Brian Shoop.

Brian is a writer/director that first directed me in the musical My Fair Lady in 1998, and almost ten years later he put together his first feature film called Treasure Blind, which I was fortunate enough to come in at the last second and pick up a part in the last three days of shooting as one of the main civil war characters who bury the McGuffin of the film.

Seeing Brian in action helming the film made me realize what all it took to pull off a feature film, and seeing it happen firsthand showed me what I would eventually be in for (and that it didn’t require you to be in Hollywood and sitting on a mountain of money to make a film).

While the day was long, we were able to knock out 80% of his scenes since they all revolved around the same location since Brian was playing Gabe, the vagabond that found some charity in the colorblind artist that had nobody else to talk to (or share lunch with).

The end of the day found me sitting on the curb after everything had been packed out.  I felt content and wanting to soak the feeling in, not knowing what the rest of the production would bring.  But, I had a faithful crew and had plenty of wind in the sails for whatever would come next… which the next day held mourning the loss of a character whose scenes we hadn’t filmed yet…

Fun note: Brian had lost a tremendous amount of weight in the year prior to filming Greyscale, and he spent most of the day eating hamburgers… I tried to limit the number of takes he had to endure food-wise.

Scenes filmed: [6,8,10,11-,12,15] [41] [58,63] [110,112] [125,128] (8.75 pages)
-Oliver & Gabe

Interested in being a part of Greyscale (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1321390/)?  While the film has reached picture lock, there is now an opportunity for three new roles!

SCENARIO: Within the film there is a scene where a character named Winston is watching his beloved TV show when he is interrupted by the main protagonist, Oliver.  We start out on a long dolly shot of Winston in his house before we reach him and see that he is watching TV.  We hear an exciting Sci-Fi show with three characters bantering in the background, and it’s on for about 30 seconds before Winston is interrupted by Oliver arriving and he turns the show off.

NOTE: This is a SAG contracted project, and since we have locked picture, we have finished our work with the Screen Actors Guild.  We are not averse to reopening talks with them, but since this is just :30, we’d need a good reason to go through the paperwork again.  Unless you are SAG, all pay is deferred at $100 per role and immediate IMDb credit on an already established film.

ROLES:

“Cap’n” - Male, 20s-50s, His ship is under attack and he’s trying to keep everything under control by ordering around his crew.
“Hobbes” - Male, 20s-30s, The pilot who is doing everything he can to ensure that the ship isn’t going down.
“Ariel” - Female, 20s-30s, The first mate who is talking to the Captain and Hobbes via an intercom, reporting that they’re being boarded while she’s trying to fight off intruders.

The Audition Process:
I will be accepting auditions online however you can get them to me, whether you post it to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, e-mail me the video or an .mp3 (granted, the largest attachment I can accept is 25mb).

First, download the sides (the whole scene, essentially) at http://greyscalemovie.com/greyscalescifisides.pdf

Second, if you are local to the Tulsa area, I will accept any quality recording (but those with access to good recording equipment will be preferred, but an excellent performance would warrant meeting with the actor to record their voice on our equipment. If you are not local, then we will need you to have access to quality recording equipment so you can send in the final performance to include in the film.)

Feel free to e-mail any and all questions to casting@greyscalemovie.com or post them on our Facebook page.  Once you have posted your audition somewhere, send us an e-mail with a link as to where we can hear it.

*EDIT* The deadline for submissions is January 8th at 10pm CST. *EDIT*

Hope to be hearing from you soon!

Regards,
Ryan Dunlap
Writer/Director/Producer of Greyscale

Trivia: The show pays homage to a certain FOX show that was canceled vey quickly back in ‘02, and Oliver mentions that all of Winston’s shows wind up getting canceled, and Winston has hope for this show, even though they play the episodes out of order and preempt it with sports events…

Are you an unsigned artist or in a band?  The Tulsa-based independent feature film Greyscale (www.greyscalemovie.com, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1321390/) is looking for local talent to showcase for the movie’s soundtrack.

With nearly 50 Tulsa-metro based locations and over 70 local actors (with a few Hollywood actors such as Doug Jones from Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy 1 & 2; Tim Russ from Star Trek: Voyager, and Samantha Who?, and Anthony Tyler Quinn from Boy Meets World and No Greater Love), Greyscale is shaping up to be one of the largest scaled grassroots films to come from the area in recent history.

We already have a composer crafting a score, but we’re looking for are the following music:

-1 song that would be played in the background of a coffee shop (somber tone, slower paced)
-2-3 songs that would be played in the background of a diner (1 for one scene, 1-2 for another, longer scene)
-1-2 songs that would be played over the radio inside of car scenes (1 uptempo rock, 1 any genre)
-1 song to be played in the background of a scene that a couple thugs would be listening to.

We’re wanting professional sounding tracks only.  We’re trying to keep it as local as possible, but are open to any interested parties.

If you are interested, please send an email to rdunlap@darosfilms.com with the subject “Greyscale Soundtrack,” with some info about yourself and your music and we’ll get in touch with you with further details.

Here’s a look at the teaser trailer for Greyscale:

Much has been quiet on the waterfront… which is what happens when the production crew has long since disbanded and the 44 locations around the city are silent where the sounds of “Action,” “Cut,” and “Let’s set the dolly up along here…” once were yelled.

Nowadays the movie lives in a single room on a couple of computers.  Things are quiet, and unfortunately I’ve been silent on both this and the Daros blog… because there really aren’t many exciting things to report other than “Yes, we’re still in post.”

But, since there hasn’t been a “Yes, we’re still in post,” update in a while, I’ll give you the skinny.

Editing: We’re beginning the 6th of 7 edits before we lock.  The 5th edit went out to industry professionals and editors for fresh pairs of eyes, and now we’re readying the 6th draft to start showing to focus groups!  After we get that feedback, we’ll lock in on a 7th draft edit and move further down the road of post-production.

Sound: After we lock we’ll be laying down some ADR/looping for the few scenes that we just couldn’t get clean sound on while on location.  After that we’ll be working with a studio to mix down and foley the audio.

Effects: We’re shopping around several effects houses to do the final color grading and effects work for the movie.

Beyond that, we’re getting closer and closer to a finished product!  Runtime is sitting at about 1:49 for draft 5, and it probably won’t change too much for 6 or 7, but we’ll have to see.

Thanks for holding on!

-Ryan

A lot has been going on with Daros Films lately.  We’re essentially booked until October, and this is a very good thing.

Greyscale is deep into post-production, and some of the team got together to watch what I like to call Version .03.  There are a few elements missing still, such as soundtrack and foley, and it’s being run through rudimentary color grading to get a feel for the black and white (which to be fair, is what you’re seeing in the trailer and screengrabs, so it’s a bit more involved than slapping on a basic black and white filter).

At the moment I’m very pleased with how things are shaping up, and as we bring in fresh eyes to watch the edit, it’s incredibly enlightening to see what elements people are picking up on, and what’s being glossed over.

I learned something recently though…

(Brian Shoop as Gabe)

.:MacGuffins and Love Stories

…As long as the emotional heart of the story is clear and working, the plotline that accompanies it that deals more with the twisty nature of noir doesn’t have to be fully understood, and spending time making sure the audience gets everything at first blush will probably bog things down (go ahead and tell me you understood all the double-crosses and factions in The Maltese Falcon the first time you watched it…).

All of the needed info is available, but it might take more than one run through to understand exactly how the 3D puzzle fits together.  Did I mention Memento is a favorite of mine?

The emotional track though… I still get a little choked up every time I watch the end (and I’m told I’m not the only one), so as a storyteller, I feel like my goal is accomplished if I can get people to care more about the characters than the macguffin… because I’ve yet to leave the theater thinking about a macguffin that made me want to be a better person.

.:Other Things
As I continue to work on the edit, the rest of the Greyscale crew is continuing to hone their skills on a pet project that our world-traveling DP, John Barnett (just left Israel and is in France at the moment) is coming back into town to shoot on the new Canon 5D Mk II.  I’m excited to see how it turns out and hope to be able to make it to set a few times and be more than just a producer.  More details on that later.

-R

Greyscale Trailer from Daros Films on Vimeo.

Friday, October 3rd

This was the beginning of the church invasion… We set up in Tulsa Bible Church’s sanctuary to find our runaway Roger, played by Aaron Kruse.

Again we employed the very noir-styled lighting techniques (making sure lights were 90 degrees away from camera, etc), and for the first time we were reshooting over one of our equipment tests as we had a callback for 4 potential Rogers and ran the scene (and recorded it) many times, so setting up for the actual movie performance ran fairly quickly.

After we wrapped for the night, we stored the equipment at the church and set up to shoot with Brian Shoop for what was going to be one of the longest shoot days of our early schedule.

Fun note: Aaron and his brother Justin both tried out for the role of Roger.  While Aaron took the role, Justin plays the piano piece that Roger is playing in the movie.

Scenes filmed: 50, 50a (2 pages)
-Oliver & Roger