Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr. Launching HARBINGER DOWN Kickstarter Campaign

© Studio ADI

Academy Award-winning Visual Effects artists Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr., co-founders of Studio ADI (Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc.) have launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring their science fiction/horror film celebrating animatronics and makeup FX, “Harbinger Down,” to the silver screen. Gillis and Woodruff hope fans are excited to help not only make a new horror classic, but also to uplift an art form. The filmmakers’ goal is to raise $350,000 from fan support via the Kickstarter campaign by June 7, 2013 to get the project off the ground.

HARBINGER DOWN, set to star notable sci-fi and horror film actor Lance Henriksen, depicts a group of grad students who 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 quickly become 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. After being locked in ice for three decades, the creatures aren’t about to give up the warmth of human companionship.

“Animatronics and Makeup FX have been utilized less frequently in recent films, but this is not because of audience disinterest,” announced Gillis, who will write and direct the film. “In the spirit of sci-fi/horror classics, Alien and The Thing, Harbinger Down is a tense, claustrophobic full-length creature film that will feature only practical Animatronics and Makeup Effects. Fans of the art of Animatronics and Makeup FX know this technique is currently overlooked by the big studios; I’m hoping the fans will help us remedy that by supporting this labor of love.”

“Our company, Amalgamated Dynamics, will create the kind of Oscar caliber Creature Effects for which we are known,” commented Woodruff, who will produce, along with Studio ADI’s Jennifer Tung. “Traditional techniques still have a place in modern genre films. We didn’t give up painting, when cameras were invented.”

Gillis and Woodruff have over 60 years of experience between them and have worked with many top filmmakers, including James Cameron, David Fincher, Paul Verhoeven, Ridley Scott, Neill Blomkamp, Robert Zemeckis, Joe Johnston, Nora Ephron and Mike Nichols just to name a few. The filmmakers are utilizing Kickstarter to ask supporters of “old-school” visual effects to give them the opportunity to show it.

Contributors to the Harbinger Down Kickstarter Campaign will receive unique, amazing, thrilling, one-of-a-kind incentives for supporting the project.

More details about the project can be found on the Harbinger Down Kickstarter website: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1117671683/harbinger-down-a-practical-creature-fx-film