Harbinger Down - Kickstarter - CGI-free Horror from the Aliens / Tremors FX Team

[wilder]

The FX Artists Behind 'Tremors' and 'Aliens' are Making a CGI-Free Horror Movie and Need Your Help
via movies.com

"The creatures survived, but not without mutation."

That's only part of the description for a new horror movie called Harbinger Down, but you can already picture a movie in your head. And if you're a fan of movies from the '70s, '80s and '90s, you no doubt picture it having some pretty badass physical creature effects in it. And were the movie made during that time, chances are Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. would have brought those creatures to life.

Between the two of them, they've made the twisted masterpieces at the center of movies like Aliens, Tremors, The Mosnter Squad, Starship Troopers, The Terminator, Predator, and dozens more. And now they're making a movie in the vein of those sci-fi/horror classics, and they need your help. Why do they need your help? Because Hollywood doesn't care about practical special effects any more.

Take 2011's The Thing, for example. Gillis and Woodruff Jr.'s company, Amalgamated Dynamics, was hired to make a suite of realistic creatures that could be puppeted in person to match the incredible work from John Carpenter's original film. And they did just that. And it looked incredible. But then, for reasons that were far beyond their control, the studio decided to just CGI over all of their team's hardwork, and that's why the movie looks so...artificial.

It was a slap in the face to lovers of practical special effects and a wake up call to Gillis and Woodruff Jr-- if Hollywood won't make creature movies like they did in the '80s anymore, then they'll just make it on their own. Well, relatively speaking. They're still looking for some support from genre fans, and that's where Kickstarter comes into play.

Harbinger Down is about a team of grad students, led by Lance Henriksen (!), aboard a research vessel in the Bering Sea who come across a piece of recently thawed wreckage from an old Soviet space experiment; wreckage that happens to be infested with "aggressively mutating organisms." So, it's kind of like The Thing, but on a boat. And we are 10,000% okay with that plot description.

The team are already making the movie - there's a proof-of-concept trailer in front of the below video - but they're looking to raise a mere $350,000 on Kickstarter to help along the way. Keep in mind that Zach Braff was asking for $2 million for a movie about a father having a mid-life crisis. These are Oscar-winning effects artists asking for a fraction of that to make an old school monster movie. We're really, really, really hoping fans can get behind that. It would be an absolute shame if Gillis and Woodruff Jr. could not only not get a movie made through the traditional Hollywood system, but they couldn't even go the fan route, either.

Check out Gillis' pitch for the movie below, and please consider supporting this project. There are a lot of interesting things on Kickstarter these days, but for our money (literally), this is one of the most interesting.

Pitch video (with FX examples)

Their creature effects for The Thing remake before it changed gears and went full CGI

[nashville video company]

I am always amazed at video production.  Did your kickstarter campaign get funded?  I make kickstarter videos for a living and think you totally have an awesome project.  Personally I can not make special effects like you guys do, but I guess everyone has their thing.  Check out some of the kickstarter ideas I have: 

http://www.wemakevideos.net/video-production-services/kickstarter-video-production/

[Pubrick]

..April fools?