Tyler Moore and Clay Walker have seen the future, and men with issues should be afraid — very afraid.
It’s a female-dominated world, fuelled by a global power shift that makes the title of Transmission, their feature film debut, appropriate — even if their inspiration had as much to do with the transmission of information in unexpected ways.
Excited that their concept trailer is already a Top-40 hit on CineCoup, the online, fan-driven independent “film accelerator,” the Victoria filmmakers hope their own future might include CineCoup’s top prize.
Ninety projects backed by 270 filmmakers are competing to become one of 10 projects optioned for development based on voting by fans who can rate and review trailers and monitor filmmaker “missions.”
The competition includes titles like Prom Night of the Living Dead, The Last Video Store and AutoScript, a film about the discovery that “the hottest writer in Hollywood is a computer.”
Now eligible to make the Top 15 being voted on April 25 to 28, Transmission could later be one of the top five finalists evaluated by an industry jury. The winner gets up to $1 million in production financing and guaranteed theatrical release in Cineplex theatres next year.
“An obsessive investigator, haunted by dreams of a post-apocalyptic future, struggles to right a wrong he hasn’t committed yet,” reads a logline for the film. Moore will direct from Walker’s screenplay inspired by their creative collaboration.
Moore wears another hat as Jack Valiant, a workaholic private investigator in 1954 sequences who realizes too late he’s in over his head when he tries to rescue a mysterious woman, Miss White (Stephanie Halber), from a life of prostitution. He uses clues from nightmares set 230 years in the future, where he resurfaces as an amnesiac and is drawn to her alter-ego, Scarlett.
Early black-and-white retro sequences morph into colour for 2184, where Valiant is taken prisoner by the Maverics, a male commando unit at war with womankind — the deadly Fatals and their tyrannical Queen Aurora (Ana-Maria Butcura).
“Valiant’s been thinking about getting married but gets cold feet and has these future dreams where women are taking over his mind and thought process,” explains Moore, 36. “It’s a natural thing many men go through when they commit for life, and we’re expressing that in an artistic way.”
Walker, 26, had dreamt about such a project for years before meeting Moore, a role-playing games enthusiast, actor and Methodica-trained acting teacher from DeBolt, Alta.
“His dream takes place in the post-apocalyptic era. My material in 1954 was fused with the drama that comes from the future,” he said. “We’re vibing on a graphic novel-esque kind of world, with some noir and a bit of sci-fi.”
The duo, both avid film buffs, watched each other’s favourite films during their creative journey.
“Clay has this belief that if you take things far enough into the future, there will be a real shift between masculinity and femininity,” he said. “We’re not trying to pooh-pooh women, but to show how control and absolute power corrupts.”
They’re both fans of Christopher Nolan films, particularly Inception, said Moore, whose other inspirational films include Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, L.A. Confidential and Drive, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s slow-burn crime drama.
“I love his ideology, how he takes these very artistic European shots juxtaposed with violence,” he said. “It allowed me to go, ‘Yes, you can fuse different ideas into the same film.’ It has a dreamlike, fairy-tale esthetic based on a pulp novel.”
Moore, on the board at CineVic, harnessed support from the collective and with Walker recruited local actors and their tight-knit crew, including artist Kristin Grant, whose intricate stenciled body-art designs adorn Queen Aurora and her minions.
Grant, assisted by Christina Cheply, who coloured other characters with a brush-on gold body powder from Murray’s Trick and Joke Shop, did
specialized makeup for the royal court scene to augment the work of the film’s key makeup artist and department head Jessica Dafoe.
“The girls loved the future,” said Moore, who shot the teaser trailer’s palace scenes at the Sunset Room special-events venue.
Other locations included Belmiro’s restaurant in the Executive House hotel; a Saanichton turkey barn courtesy of Pat Hourigan; and exteriors at Macauley Point and Christ Church Cathedral.
“Churches and castles are timeless, and we had to be economical,” he said, noting hard costs were only $500.
Moore describes the experience as akin to “an online reality show” as local talent rallied to the cause.
“It’s a bunch of filmmakers trying to build their audience before you even shoot the film, which is very unique,” he said.
“It’s a shift that will continue to happen rather than having executives prospect what people want to watch, or through marketing tell them what to watch. Now it’s about people being directly involved in what they want to see before it’s made.”
If Transmission makes the cut, the film would be shot this summer, with delivery required in December for Cineplex.
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