Kickstarter Spotlight: CGI-Free Creatures Movie ‘Harbinger Down’ From ‘Alien,’ ‘Tremors’ FX Team
By The Movie God
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Thursday, May 16th, 2013 at 10:00 pm
Another great Kickstarter project to take a peek at if you’re looking for something new to back, Harbinger Down is a horror movie that promises to have not one single CGI creature.
Most movie purists loathe the over-saturated world of CGI that we now live in, and crave the practical effects that are being used less and less every day as movie studios sacrifice quality to save a little coin. This makes a project like Harbinger Down all the more appealing.
The movie is being made by Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. and their company Amalgamated Dynamics, a practical effects workshop that has worked on many movies, including Tremors, Alien 3, Starship Troopers, and the recent remake of The Thing. They’ve also got some industry friends who are going to help them make the movie who have worked on movies like Aliens, Terminator 2, and The Empire Strikes Back, just to name a few. Between them all, they have four Oscar wins and ten nominations.
Continue reading for more info and to see a video from the filmmakers on why you should pledge and help them make this movie.
Here’s what the movie will be about:
A group of grad students have booked passage on the fishing trawler Harbinger to study the effects of global warming on a pod of Orcas in the Bering Sea. When the ship’s crew dredges up a recently thawed piece of old Soviet space wreckage, things get downright deadly. It seems that the Russians experimented with tardigrades, tiny resilient animals able to withstand the extremes of space radiation. The creatures survived, but not without mutation.
Now the crew is exposed to aggressively mutating organisms. And after being locked in ice for 3 decades, the creatures aren’t about to give up the warmth of human companionship.
Now, although the movie’s creatures won’t be made using CGI—this is, after all, a movie to celebrate practical effects—that doesn’t mean that there won’t be digital tools used for certain things like falling snow and breath vapor, to remove things that shouldn’t be there, and to enhance the overall look of things.
So if you’re a fan of practical, non-CGI creatures in your horror movies, be sure to help Harbinger Down become awesome by heading to their Kickstarter page. The goal that’s been set is only $350,000 (small for a movie, especially one with lots of special effects) and they’re currently halfway through the $70Ks with 21 days to go, but, obviously, the more they get the bigger and more awesome the finished movie will be.
Oh, right, and one more thing: Lance Henriksen. That is all!
I’m excited to see this happen. Lance Henriksen is THE definitive SciFi/horror star. I read elsewhere that Gillis is the one that rigged him up to be split in two in Aliens.
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This is amazing. If anyone can create an instant classic, it’s Gillis and Woodruff.
Comment by Christopher Cooksey — May 17, 2013 @ 9:25 am
Very cool! Looks like an awesome monster movie!
Comment by Tim Ponzuric — May 29, 2013 @ 9:44 pm
I’m excited to see this happen. Lance Henriksen is THE definitive SciFi/horror star. I read elsewhere that Gillis is the one that rigged him up to be split in two in Aliens.
Comment by GregFXlover — May 29, 2013 @ 11:45 pm
I love Tremors! I hope this happens.
Comment by cary — May 30, 2013 @ 12:22 pm