
The final week of events at Crowbar is starting to take shape, and right now, it looks like a jellyfish.
Tampa Bay-based filmmakers behind “Jellyfish Season” said they’re taking over the famed Ybor City venue on its last Monday in business. The gig kicks off the beginning of the last week for Crowbar, which will close before August following 20 years in the historic district.
The Florida-made feature-length film started production a year ago and hopes for a wide release this fall after it makes rounds in the festival circuit. Shot entirely on Kodak 16mm film, the movie directed by Dylan Melcher and written by Matthew Walker follows a trio of friends who go on a beach vacation. The getaway quickly becomes a series of weird, cosmic occurrences (“from mistaken identity and extraterrestrial abduction to shady lovers on the run”) that force the boys to confront the realities of their own lives. “Jellyfish Season is a surreal comedy about midlife crisis, identity, and the strangely divine nature of being human,” press material for the film adds.
Behind the scenes stills shared with Creative Loafing Tampa Bay find the crew—which includes Kristofer Atkinson, Zachery Howard, Taylor Prater, Destiny Greer and others—in local spots like Tampa’s Sunshine Thrift, off the main drag in Clearwater Beach, and at Smuggler’s Cove mini-golf.
The film was also scored by Chance Reynolds, the drumming, singing, impossible-to-look-away-from, frontman of the eccentric jazz band Chaunces.
Melcher told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that after cutting the film, he added scratch jazz tracks, then handed the work over to Reynolds who teamed up with Eric Zabala (vibraphone and piano), Alex Malkovich (saxophone and guitar), and Cooper Madden (bass) for the final product.
“He turned all the music off, and essentially cut it in his studio with his band, watching the film and playing music to it, and even like working with the moments—as the emotion rises in the scene, like he would rise the music and then bring it down, then kind of do these like really choppy things based on the actual film itself,” Melcher said. “He’s not in it, but he wrote direct to it.”
All but two of the tracks on the album were composed by Reynolds, who is joined by some of the actors and composer Will DeHaan on the 13-track outing.
Melcher pressed 200 of the pink vinyl, which comes with red splatter as an homage to a comedic scene in the film. The release show will feature a DJ spinning the record, previews of the film with commentary from the cast, and close with Reynolds leading a set of live music.
Melcher thought they would do a vinyl release in July, but went out on a limb by calling Crowbar co-founder and owner Tom DeGeorge to see if they could do the release there before the venue wrapped its legendary run in the Tampa music scene.
“I’ve spent so many years there and seen so many legendary shows and whatnot. It seemed like a perfect place to try to get the vinyl release into,” Melcher added.
DeGeorge had one date, July 27, left to book.
“Crowbar is all about local community, bringing everyone together, and that’s exactly why we made the film,” Melcher said. “So it worked out perfect.”

‘Jellyfish Season’ vinyl release w/Chance Reynolds
Time Mon., July 27, 7 p.m.
Location Crowbar, 1812 North 17th Street, Tampa
This article appears in June 18 – 24, 2026.

