CALGARY FILMMAKER TO SHOOT MONSTER WEBSERIES
Eleven-minute pilot wins $50,000 grant to produce five more episodes
Low-budget filmmakers are nothing if not adaptable.
The crew behind the 11-minute pilot for Snowshoe and Monster, one of two projects in Alberta to pick up a $50,000 win recently from Telus Storyhive to be turned into a five-episode web series, expertly mined the inherent creepiness of our wintry climes for a thriller largely set in a desolate forest.
But now the team needs to film five more episodes, with cameras set to roll early in the summer. This means, fingers crossed, that Alberta will be without snow.
“We have to change the name to Summer’s Monster because there is no snow,” says Siobhan Cooney, the project lead, producer and actress for the project. “We are definitely going to have to mix it up a bit. But I think it will work well and it will be nicer for the crew to not have to bear the cold.”
Summer is actually the name of Cooney ’s character, a young woman who is investigating her grandfather’s mysterious disappearance in the woods and whether it’s related to sightings of a woodland “monster” with glowing eyes.
She is joined by a conspiracy theorist (Aaron Belot) and scientist/ photographer (Ivy Miller), who do not see eye to eye on such matters.
Their bickering will provide some comic relief in upcoming episodes, but Cooney says the focus of Summer’s Monster will be tone and atmosphere and, of course, the monster himself/ herself.
It’s actually a 2.5-metre-tall puppet designed by locals Ali DeRegt and Monica Ila.
“The lack of special effects were, I don’t want to say a challenge, but it made us think in a different way,” Cooney says. “We knew going into it that we didn’t have a huge budget for that. A lot of thrillers and horror movies have a lot of CGI and animation in them. It was going back to how horror movies used to be made, where they actually had to make monsters and stuff. That was an interesting challenge.”
The 215 entries into Storyhive’s 2017 Webseries Edition, which is open to filmmakers in Alberta and British Columbia, were whittled down to 30 finalists earlier this year, 15 of which were from Alberta. From there, four were chosen from audience voting and a jury to receive the $50,000 grant to produce a full web series.
Since Snowshoe and Monster won the $50,000, Cooney has founded the production company Virescent Cinema, which will specialize in sustainable and wastefree productions. Future projects include another Storyhive production. For You June will be competing in the shorts edition, which begins April 3. It tells the story about two young women who fall in love and spend a summer together.
Cooney is currently working toward her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama at the University of Calgary, but says she is finding herself quite well-suited for the role of producer.
“I find that a lot of the film work in Calgary is rarely given to local actors, a lot of the time they pull from Vancouver and Toronto,” she says. “I find I’ve had more success and been able to produce myself more as an actor by producing my own work and really dive into more interesting characters.”
Summer’s Monster will be available on TELUS Optik TV on Demand and Storyhive.com this fall.
The lack of special effects were, I don’t want to say a challenge, but it made us think in a different way.