Tyler Gibb – Writer, Director, Editor, Filmmaker

As those of you who frequent this site may remember, the new project (now officially called “Refrain”), is a movie about – among other things – music.

Music is a huge source of inspiration for me as well as being one of life’s little mysteries since I, myself, have the musical dexterity of lobster. So with that, music is very much at the core of Refrain and as such, my partner (Vidya) and I made sure to get a head-start on the soundtrack. It’s completely backward way of working for me, but I’ll tell you; it’s great. In the deepest, darkest hours of self-doubt about going balls-out and producing another independent feature film, it’s nothing short of adrenalizing to put the demo soundtrack to your movie on the speakers to remind you of what you’re working toward.

So this week, I’m happy to bring you all a little taste.

Now I hate MySpace just as much as everybody else who’s too-cool-to-be-on-myspace but apparently they still host music well, so I’ve taken my self-righteousness and sucked it up.

You can hear a pre-production track from the movie at myspace.com/hearrefrain.

And check out the Refrain film page in its infancy at myspace.com/watch_refrain.

Link to us, friend us, post us, do whatever it is MySpacers do. I’m giving this a try.

More on casting next week.

T

The search begins.

What’s in a name? A lot actually, which is why it’s so troubling to me that I’m generaly pretty bad at titles (see “Minushi”*).

Anyway as I announced only a couple weeks ago – or in the parlance of our times, a couple posts ago – the new project is called The Great Big Emptines, for now. For now because – full disclosure – I’m not completely sold on the name myself. It’s a title that sums up the theme of the movie, which is an important trait in a title if you ask me but I’m not sure it has that memorable a quality. A trait that may be even more important as far as marketing is concerned. Something like Snakes on a Plane for example covers both those bases with shameless efficiency. Or take Deep Impact which is just on the tasteful side of a pun but also fills in the criteria very effectively both reflecting the physical catastrophy facing the characters as well as the emotional “impact” it is having on their lives.

One thing that tends to bother me in a title is when it’s appearence in the dialogue of the film immediately pulls me out of whatever tentative suspension of disbelief said narrative may have on me. Take for example, Gone Baby Gone. Great film, but the moment the words themselves – “She’s gone, baby. Gone.” – were spoken, then the actor speaking them may as well have turned his head, looked directly into the lens and winked. It pulls me out of the moment faster than a 555 number… And I’m a little concerned that the words “Great Big Emptiness” do appear in a line of dialogue in my new project… Albeit not so overtly.

And then there’s the out of left field titles. The out of left Cloverfield titles… Y’see what I did there? Yeah. I tend to gravitate toward that style of naming but then, I tend to gravitate to things that make my work less successful rather than more so for some reason… (See (again) a title like Minushi).

Titles… I ruminate on them for months; often coming up with nothing to better the initial placeholder I use to name the Word files.

But who needs a title until you’re ready to market the thing, right? Maybe, but things change when you want to create an open concept production to get you, the public, interested from the get-go…

So the The Great Big Emptiness… Will it stick? I’ll keep you posted. Until then I’ll continue to create the real-time storyboard I’ve been working on. Perhaps I’ll get a chance to post some of it here soon. More on that later too.

Until then!

*To be fair (to myself), I like the name “Minushi” it holds a lot of significance for me (and maybe for you too if you’ve received your copy of the DVD set) but from a marketing perspective it wasn’t the wisest choice of names…

I’m giving it a name. And tentatively that name is The Great Big Emptiness.

There’ll be more soon. Lots more. But sufficed to say this week I’ve been learning about “shooting scripts” and “production schedules” – things that didn’t have much relevance in the life of a solo animator.

So what is The Great Big Emptiness? Well it’s going to be a bit of a departure from Minushi, that’s sure enough… It’s going to have music, and drama, tears and blood and music. Did I mention music?

As I said, more to come. I want to make this as transparent a process as possible so that you can come along the production journey of Emptiness. But so far that journey hasn’t really even reached the foothills. It’s little more than words on a page; and a couple camera tests… But soon.