The Journey to Harbinger Down - Part 1

How a Practical Effects Movie's Kickstarter Campaign Changed My Life

Feb 06, 2022

The date was May 8th, 2013 and my optimistic demeanor was showing multiple stress fractures. Less than a year had gone by since the financial strain of living in California, a state that my wife and I had grown up in, that we loved, had become too much and forced us to move to the great state of Texas. My wife had found a job and was working days, and I was working nights at a movie theater while searching for better prospects but this last desperate leap of faith had taken everything we had, knocking us back way past square one. Every day was a struggle to make rent and put food on the table but the most disheartening part was how dark the future had become. Every prospect we had hung our hopes on was now miles behind us on the Westcoast, any clue to our future still hidden in the new and unfamiliar landscape we now occupied.

We had left our steady jobs and the value we had cultivated in them, for this? We were lonely, fighting to keep our heads above water, tired, wondering if we could ever regain our bearings and continue towards our ambitions. Our children were thankfully too young to understand and as long as they had what they needed, at least we could take comfort in their smiles.

But what does all of this have to do with a low-budget monster movie?

Back in California, like so many others who lived there, I had ambitions of being a filmmaker. Aside from retail and all the failed office jobs, I actually had tried a lot of other professions from gallery artist, to comic book penciler, to being a picture framer, and had then settled in as a Photoshop catalog artist at a furniture company called Lamps Plus, in Chatsworth. However, to me, even that path had a ceiling, so I was also trying to create extremely ambitious, special effects-heavy short films, from our apartment, using green screens and some local actors who were interested in what I was doing. I had already had some success with a Ray Bradbury project, so my enthusiasm for filmmaking had blown past all the “plan-B” careers I felt I had let sidetrack me.

Me and actor Jeremy Hans on a green screen alien planet.

Because of the low quality of my equipment, I decided to go with a “grindhouse” look, with a lot of dust and scratches to create a fake degraded film quality that I could pass as a style, rather than a limitation. I was learning After Effects from a co-worker which was opening up a lot of possibilities in my imagination. I’d work at my job by day and then on my movies by night, often well into the AM.

When I was at work, I’d often take walks around the neighboring industrial building on my breaks. On a particular one, I came across someone painting what I can only describe as a giant anime character’s head outside of a building that I had heard housed a special effects studio. After fetching some co-worker friends because I thought it was really cool, we all tried to check it out from a respectful distance. We were spotted and invited to come in and get a tour of their shop.

Our hosts turned out to be the owners, Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr. and the shop turned out to be the Emmy and Oscar-winning Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporated (or ADI for short), a staple of the many behind-the-scenes featurettes and special effects documentaries that had inspired me, through the years. It felt like fate had led me there. We spent a little time looking around wide-eyed but then had to return to work. Alec had given me his email and allowed me to keep in touch. I could show him what I was working on and ask questions about what he did.

Honestly, I didn’t think I was of the caliber to ever work for ADI or that there could possibly be an opportunity to do so but being close to that energy was inspiring. I was renewed but when I moved to Texas it felt like walking away from something special that I might never get a chance at, again. However, I had to do what was right for my family, and clinging onto something so small as that would be as delusional as it was irresponsible.

Then, one day in Texas after a particularly dreary and maybe even a little hopeless feeling day, I logged onto my computer and saw something amazing. ADI had launched a Kickstarter for a practical effects movie Alec wanted to write and direct called Harbinger Down.

The pitch video is still as close to perfect as I’ve seen one get for crowdfunding, sighting all the amazing movies they’ve been a part of over the years, the Alien franchise, Starship Troopers, Tremors, and the prequel to The Thing. They talked about how important their craft was, why it mattered to them, and that they knew there were enough movie fans out there who cared, to make this happen. They weren’t about to stand by and watch their artform become overrun by CGI, just because it was the hot new thing.

They shared the optimism that I had clung to for so long in the face of countless people, constantly telling me, “It’s over. Nobody cares about this stuff anymore. Hollywood runs everything. You can’t succeed unless you do it their way.” Honestly, in hindsight, the litany of defeatism and negativity that runs in so many’s thought processes and their determination to pass it onto as great a number of others as they can is disturbing to me. Don’t give me that, “They mean well.” crap, either. They don’t. They’re doing it because they feel threatened in the face of what they themselves were never brave enough to overcome. It enrages them to see people persevere where they gave up. I digress, though.

Here I was, over two hundred miles away from the action and I never felt I needed to be part of something so badly in all of my life. What could I do? I couldn’t contribute money. I was broke. I couldn’t work on the film. I wasn’t in California. Then something jumped out at me that made me a little worried. Hardly anybody knew. The campaign was launched but it wasn’t getting any coverage and its social media presence was close to zero.

I knew I could fix that so I wrote to Alec. “I don’t have any money but what I can donate to your project is my time,” I said, or something to that effect. “Please, let me reach out to people on your behalf, we can form a street team of fans like a radio station does. We can get other well-known makeup artists to share what you’re doing on their social media. I know of popular social media influencers that would jump at the chance to interview you.”

Thumbnail I created for the Kickstarter Video

Alec agreed and put me in touch with one of his people to organize it. I drew in some of my friends like Rich Goddard and Tim Ponzuric, who were with me on the day we met Alec, Greg Johnson who I had met in Texas, and some others who I knew through social media. We were creating fan art, thumbnails, reaching out to everyone we knew that might help spread the word, handing out flyers at local events. Greg got Cracked.com to cover it and I lined up an interview with Comicbookgirl19 which really launched things into the stratosphere.

Harbinger Down was suddenly going from being a little indie horror film to an underground phenomenon. Other crowdfunders were popping up boasting their use of practical effects, Lance Henriksen of Aliens fame was giving regular updates because he wanted to star in the film, fans (like Rashad Santiago, who would later go on to win the SyFy makeup challenge show FaceOff) were posting videos to show their excitement for the project…

…and even major directors like J.J. Abrams were suddenly starting to speak more lovingly about in-camera movie magic, again, and no, I don’t think that was a coincidence.

Abrams hying practical effects on the set of Episode VII

However, it was still close. When I wasn’t at my night job or tending to my kids I was working around the clock to keep the hype going. For me, it went beyond just helping artists I admired to get their movies made. It was the realization of what I had been convinced by others was impossible. As I later told Alec, “If you couldn’t accomplish it, what right did I have thinking that I could?”

Well, on June 7th, 2013 the threshold for funding was crossed, making it number one on the list of highest fan-funded horror movies. Yes, the fans, not Hollywood had given the green light for studioADI to produce its first feature sci-fi/horror, starring Lance Henriksen.

However, the journey was just getting started, and what happened next would put me on a new path towards fulfilling my own career as a filmmaker.

But, more about that in part two which you can read by clicking HERE.