THE NARRATIVE

Em & Selma Go Griffin Hunting is set in an alternate depression-era 1930, where there exists a long-standing cultural paradigm that mothers bring their adolescent daughters on a sacred rite-of-passage pilgrimage to hunt and kill a mythical creature of the mother’s choosing.

Society will only accept a girl as a grown, respectable woman once she completes this bloody pilgrimage, and failure to do so will result in crushing stigmatization – or possibly much worse.

In our film, mother Selma can only afford a license to hunt an invasive, inbred subspecies of griffins with daughter Em. Their already-strained relationship comes to a boiling point when Em begins to question the validity of this long-standing cultural tradition over the course of the hunt, threatening to irrevocably destroy their bond forever.

Our film is an allegorical examination of cultural expectations, inter-generational conflict, trauma, the dangers of dogmatic belief, and the painful road to adulthood we all must undergo, filtered through a metaphorical fairy-tale lens.

WHY THIS TALE?

I’ve had a long-standing fixation on the cultural and anthropological significance of rites-of-passage initiations – the way they shape social frameworks, how they codify us at a level of individual agency. Rites that augured the end of juvenescence were once a universal axiom, and while many of their more extreme incarnations are lost to our modern secular norms, these nonetheless remain a perennial mainstay of the human experience whose significance are ignored at our cultural peril. Our team sought to explore this concept through the framework of a dark, timeless fable whose fantastical elements exist in service of these themes.

Inspired by a love of Jungian archetypes, cultural anthropology and fictional ecological systems (“Spec Biology”), we hope these disparate ingredients congeal into a captivating short film that sets a tense mother/daughter story within a Neo-western backdrop inhabited by a variety of fanciful, biologically plausible yet spectacular creatures.

Above: Female variation on the “Wood Nymph” creature. Sculpt & look dev by Gabriel Beauvais, based on an original design by Mike Luard.

I sometime jokingly pitch the tone of the film as “Ingmar Bergman takes a stroll through Jurassic Park”, and that actually isn’t a far cry from what you can expect tonally. 

Our goal with Em & Selma is a thematically-complex, morally-nuanced fairy tale that also happens to contain superbly-realized monsters and visual effects.

Above: The “Queen Griffin” design, sculpt & look dev by Greg Strangis.

With photography and editorial behind us, we’re deeply fortunate to be joined by an international team of designers, animators, compositors and other post-production wizards, whose resumes are a bona fide rolodex of Hollywood tentpoles (more on that below). We’re incredibly proud of the collaboration achieved thus far, and cannot wait to share the efforts of our globe-spanning team.

Above: A close-up on the “Male Griffin”. Design, sculpt & look dev by Greg Strangis.

In order to complete the film by a reasonable date, however, we need YOUR help to kick our resources to the next level, expanding our team to include a handful of additional VFX hires and funds for sound design, mixing, music scoring, color grading, deliverables and festival entry fees. Otherwise, we cannot guarantee that Em and Selma will find their way out of the forest alive…

CAST

Milly Shapiro (Em) is a New York-based performer best known for her turn in Ari Aster’s 2018 breakout A24 hit, Hereditary. Prior to that, Milly won a Tony for her turn in the Broadway run of Matilda, making her the youngest recipient in the awards’ history. This was later parlayed into a Grammy nomination for “Best Musical Theater Album“ for Shapiro. She is presently enrolled at New York University, where she studies film.

Above: Milly Shapiro (“Hereditary”) stars as Em.

Above: Shapiro’s turn in Ari Aster’s debut feature “Hereditary” for A24 garnered much acclaim.

Shapiro was drawn to portray Em by the character’s defiant outcast spirit, and her relatable need to question cultural/societal norms and expectations. 

Above: Star Milly Shapiro & director Alex Thompson. Photo credit: Isaiah Kang (L), Allan Wan (R).

Pollyanna McIntosh (Selma) is a Scottish-born performer and director best known for portraying Jadis on the TV series Walking Dead, its spinoff Walking Dead: World Beyond and for her turn as Queen Ælfgifu in Netflix’s Vikings: Valhalla. Prior to that, she played the titular character in Lucky McKee’s 2011 Sundance hit The Woman, whose sequel McIntosh parlayed into her own feature directorial debut, Darlin‘, which premiered at SXSW in 2019.

Above: Pollyanna McIntosh as Selma in “Em & Selma Go Griffin Hunting”.

Pollyanna was drawn to Selma’s character by the morally ambiguous and complex relationship to both Em and the very same rite she now dogmatically enforces upon her own daughter, which unburies latent traumas that Selma herself must now contend with.

Above: Pollyanna McIntosh on set. Photo credit: Allan Wan.

KEY CREW

Alexander Thompson (writer/director) seeks to explore the human condition through a personal brand of cinema that infuses a love of dark fairy tales, aberrant psychology, strange monsters and even stranger people.

His prior short, Vietnam War-set horror/fable Black Dragon (Rồng đen) has played 20-plus fests including HollyShorts, Beyond Fest, Brussels Fantastic Fest, Rhode Island, Nashville and Portland Film Fests, taking home multiple wins along the way. His coming-of-age fantasy drama The Sisters was a semifinalist for the AMPAS Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship ’22.

Upcoming feature projects include Fathoms, an unconventional ghost story/domestic drama chronicling three generations of women and the sea serpent that haunts their private beach in 1930’s Cape Cod, set up with the team behind Zodiac, Shutter Island and Black Swan, as well as dark fantasy two-hander Cyrilla’s Bestiary with Armory Films (Mudbound, The Peanut Butter Falcon, Arctic) producing.

Roger Mayer (producer) has been overseeing productions for 25 years, with credits that include Sundance premieres Big River Man, avant-garde horror films The Oregonian and The Rambler, body horror opus Antibirth starring Natasha Lyonne and Chloe Sevigny, and farcical short film LaZercism starring LaKeith Stanfield for director Shaka King (Judas and the Black Messiah).

Under his boutique shingle Brooklyn Reptyle Productions, Mayer has also produced countless music video and commercial campaigns, while his most recent feature, Brutal Season, just made its world premier at Fantastic Fest ’22. Prior to that, he worked for the Sundance Film Festival for 14 years and ran both the Silver Lake Film Festival and Downtown Film Festival – Los Angeles for a combined eight years.

A lifelong cinephile with an encyclopedic knowledge of film history, Mayer is drawn toward risky, subversive material with edge, bite and an ample dose of raw humanity. 

THE CREATURES

We have the great fortune of being joined in our endeavor by top-shelf designers, asset artists, animators, compositors and other VFX professionals whose collective filmographies contain many of the highest-grossing films in history, ranging from Lord of the Rings and Avatar to Marvel projects and just about everything in between.

Above: “Queen Griffin” design, sculpt & look-dev by Senior Character Artist Greg Strangis.

While no amount of visual effects sorcery can usurp good filmmaking or drama, we knew from the outset that selling the tactile reality for our world and its speculative fauna was every bit as crucial as the casting of Em and Selma themselves. The fictional species presented in the film, a sort of collective ‘third character’, needed to look completely believable and authentically-realized as animals – not “movie monsters” – carrying with them the full range of nuanced expression and attention to performance detail one may expect from an animal subject of a David Attenborough documentary.

Above: “Male Griffin” design, sculpt and look-dev by Senior Character Artist Greg Strangis.

Real-world fauna and plausible biological functionality was an essential mandate in designing and fleshing out our bestiary. If a griffin is classically described as having avian and predatory cat components, our griffins could not be a literal synthesis of those two, but rather an animal whose traits share evolutionarily-convergent dimorphic similarities ‘at a glance’ but are in fact from their own distinctive branch of evolutionary history – replete with a genealogical tree connected to parts of our own real evolutionary history. Just as I wanted Em and Selma to feel like autonomous lived-in human beings, so too did these creatures need to feel like they came with their own personal histories and ethos.

Above: Montreal-based CG Sup and Senior Creature Modeler Gabriel Beauvais handled sculpt, look-dev and some slight design alterations for the “Wood Nymph” creatures based on initial designs by UK-based artist Mike Luard.

Above: Gabriel Beauvais handled the design, sculpt & look dev for the “Baby Griffin”.

OUR (INCREDIBLE) VISUAL EFFECTS TEAM

We are lucky to be joined in our humble little journey by an international team of animators, compositors and VFX artists whose collective filmographies account for a Who’s Who of Hollywood tentpoles. Among the many gifted artists collaborating on our film include just this small sampling below:

Gabriel Beauvais, creature artist (Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them, Jungle Book, Alien: Covenant, Ari Aster’s upcoming Disappointments Boulevard). https://www.gbeauvais.com/

Greg Strangis, creature artist (Hellboy, Antlers, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Halo TV Series). https://www.artstation.com/gregs

Morgan Loomis, creature animator (Hobbit trilogy, The Avengers, Spiderwick Chronicles, Games of Thrones, Iron Man 3, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes). https://vimeo.com/morganloomis

Andy Fraser, creature animator (The Martian, Fantastic Beasts, Harry Potters, The Ritual, Moon Knight TV Series, Star Wars: The Last Jedi). https://vimeo.com/andyfraseranimator

Isaiah Kang, Unreal Engine Artist, Senior VFX Editor (Hellraiser remake, She-Hulk , The Boys, Cowboy Bebop, Walking Dead TV Series). https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaiah-kang-6b9947119

Thomas Lhomme, CG Supervisor (Men in Black 3, It 2, Jumanji: The Next Level, Love Death & Robots, Lovecraft Country, Crawl). http://tlhomme.com/

EM & SELMA – THE FEATURE EXPANSION

Though our intent is for the Em & Selma Go Griffin Hunting short to stand perfectly well within its abbreviated medium, we make no bones about it: this piece also functions as a proof-of-concept for a feature by the same title that expands on Em and Selma’s personal and familial histories as well as the “Ritual of the Hunt” – giving us a deeper understanding into what the cultural, anthropological and familial significance of this rite entails.

While the basic arc of the story follows a similar road map to the short, the level of character nuance and scope of the world we present – to say nothing of the twists and turns the narrative takes across a bolstered runtime – will all present Em & Selma in its most fully-realized form, taking the story to much darker places than we have time to explore in the context of a short film… But that’s a conversation for another day.

Suffice to say, that film can only become a reality if we first have a spectacularly-realized short film iteration of our story on hand first, as a means of demonstrating the high bar for excellence our team is capable of delivering.

COST BREAKDOWN

In order to share Em & Selma with the world in a more expedient time frame, our team is looking to raise $55,000.00 in additional capitol. The breakdown of this cost includes but is not limited to:

Rounding out our visual effects team ($35,000). This will include a few additional part-time hires for animation, compositing and our lighting team.

Music scoring ($9,500). Composer Alexander Pedersen will be writing an original orchestral score for the film, to be performed by a fifty-piece orchestra and recorded in Prague with the same orchestra that performed notable scores like Sicario, 

Color & post sound ($4,500) – The final bells and whistles to help us share the film with the world in its grandest and best-looking, and sounding form.

Deliverables, festival entry fees, legal, contingencies ($5,500) – The last leg of the journey getting our film prepped for its life out in the world. DCPs, Blu Rays, fest submissions and final legal clearances fall under this umbrella. 

IF WE EXCEED OUR GOAL?

The more the merrier! Exceeding our financial goal will allow us to expand our team even further, thus shortening the horizon on completion and delivery of our film.

This would include additional hires in the animation and compositing departments especially – the most time-consuming and painstaking creative process of the VFX pipeline. 

We will also use the opportunity to add back in a handful of planned-but-scrapped fully-CG shots as well, bolstering the overall production value of our ambitious little saga.

IN CLOSING

Our team has worked tirelessly over the past two years on this film, while balancing day jobs on major television shows and studio films. This film has been a multi-year obsession for the keys involved, and without these funds, our dark little mother/daughter fable will never be able to spread its wings and soar.

Thank you for your time and support!

Alexander Thompson, Roger Mayer and Team Em & Selma