Shallow Water 2.0 Launches Kickstarter Campaign
You may remember that we kept you updated with the progress of the crowdfunding campaign for VFX maestro Sandy Collora’s monster movie Shallow Water. Well, Collora had decided to give Kickstarter another go to fund Shallow Water: 2.0, which will serve as a short segment in a feature anthology.
It’s currently raised just over half its target, so go on, drop it some cash. I sure wouldn’t mind another old school monster flick.
From the Press Release:
Sandy Collora is a longtime special effects artist who helped create some of the more renowned and revered creatures in modern cinema. He also produced and directed Batman Dead End – among the most downloaded short films in history. Collora has announced his long-awaited return to producing shorts with an anthology of “long shorts” – 20- to 30-minute original genre films. His first entry in the anthology is Shallow Water – “a gritty and intense film that unleashes a new cinema creature unlike anything seen before.” To help fund it, Collora has launched a Kickstarter campaign.
Shallow Water combines Collora’s three greatest loves – horror, the ocean, and the environment. “The underlying theme of Shallow Water is simple,” says Collora. “Humans repeatedly disturb the ecosystem, and the planet gets pissed off.” In the film Collora introduces The Tiburonera – “he who hunts sharks,” which he promises will be “terrifying and different.”
Shallow Water will be the first of a series of “long shorts” that he plans to combine and release as a feature, in the manner of Creepshow and Heavy Metal. Collora believes Hollywood has dropped the ball in introducing fresh new genre concepts. While he attributes it to pressures faced by studios to prioritize safety in meeting their bottom lines, he also feels sequels and remakes are now excessive and have compromised the art.
Says Collora: “I love genre films. I grew up on the original Alien and Predator, and they are awesome. But it’s too long since we had something new, unique, and powerful in that space.”
Collora was born in NY and always loved film. He moved to CA at 17 and found initial success as an artist at Stan Winston Studios, mastering the art of sculpture and character creation. He became a go-to designer of action figures, had a successful stint as a commercial director, then wrote and directed the cult classic Batman Dead End, which set records for numbers of downloads for a short. Since then his friends and fans have urged him to produce another short.
After producing the feature film Hunter Prey, and publishing three volumes of The Art of Creature and Character Design, which he funded with the help of Kickstarter, he now returns to the short film and to Kickstarter.
Shallow Water proved too costly to finance as a feature with crowdfunding, and that started Collora to thinking about doing the anthology. He sees his current Kickstarter as crucial. He seeks $85K and is off to a good start. “With Kickstarter, I can stay independent and not compromise my vision. That was a big factor in the success of Batman: Dead End. But Shallow Water is longer, with more effects – more ambitious, if you will – so I need to augment the cost with monies from Kickstarter. For this reason, I went to town on the Rewards for people who back it – great value at a low cost and, for those with more to pledge, some pretty intense limited edition collectibles. I was proud Kickstarter designated this campaign as a “Project We Love” on its very first day, and I think it was because of the cool Rewards.”
Shallow Water tells the story of a small group of fishermen who embark on a fishing trip to find a remote and mythical fishing hole deep in the Sea of Cortez. They scour the Baja peninsula, find it, but encounter unexpected sea life. Adds Collora: “It’s Mother Nature versus Human Nature.”
“I love Sandy’s work. This is a great story, the creature is fantastic, and I love the reliance on practical effects. This is what the independent film movement is all about,” adds Steve Johnson, an Academy Award-winning special FX guru.
The Kickstarter campaign is live at kck.st/1VjhXaI.
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