UPDATE: Check out what we shot this weekend in our video gallery above!
Hello! I’m making a movie. It’s a satirical science-fiction thriller called HIGHER POWERS about a small-town police department invaded by a dangerous & power-hungry supernatural force...
We raised some money this summer to shoot a teaser for the film, based on the script’s first couple scenes. It got off to a bang when amazing person Guillermo del Toro retweeted us & contributed $618 to bring us to our goal of $666. In the end, thanks to 75 more amazing people, we more than tripled our goal.
The project suddenly felt a lot bigger! I had gone into this planning to shoot it bare-bones, on my own, with my own camera. But the campaign’s success connected me with dozens of potential creative collaborators, and I even gave a very sleep-deprived interview to Forbes, where I talked about the origins of and my ambitions for the movie. Pressure mounted to make this all it could be!!
Since then, I've brought on board producer Casey Bargsten, cinematographer Anton Shavlik, and a talented cast of actors. With Casey's help & Anton on board as cinematographer, this thing is going to look 1000X better than I even imagined!
We've invested in props & special effects equipment that we'll keep using through the production of the movie. We've even found an incredibly talented composer from Los Angeles, who has already begun work on music for the film - a sampling of which you can hear in our pitch video above.
Still, friends encouraged me to aim higher. One proposed we make a short, rather than a teaser - something to give people more than a taste of this project... serve up a whole damn course! I thought about it for a while, and realized a version of the first ten pages of the script could work perfectly as a short film.
Rather than try and find a home for a piece of marketing to a movie that doesn’t yet exist... We’ll tell a story that can stand on its own, a microcosm of the feature script. Because there’s a place for shorts -- they play at film festivals. And film festivals are a great place to meet investors! And those folks will get this movie made.
But to get there, we'll need more than we have. We'll be casting four more major roles, and finding three new shooting locations. We're asking for three times the budget we have now, for around five times the work. But the budget and our hard work should get us ten times the result!
OUR GOAL - $5000
breaks down roughly as...
$1000 to rent gear
$2000 to pay folks
$2000 to feed / fly / house folks
That's right... we may just be importing some talent from Hollywood, baby!!
I hope we can make our goal -- I’ll surely end up spending more of my own money on this project either way. But even if this campaign falls flat on its face, whatever we get will help us move forward. I’ll figure out a way to make the short, by hook or by crook.
We start shooting December 10th. I’ve assembled a super-talented cast & crew and I’m so excited to see this thing come to life! Thank you to everyone for your support, we wouldn't be here without you.
You can read more about HIGHER POWERS at our first campaign page here.
Excited for y'all to see our work.
THANK YOU!!!
Shane