Elves and giants play roles The Shadow Cabal, an indie show being pitched this week at the New York Television Festival. Image courtesy Arrowstorm Entertainment
Amid a flood of snarky sitcoms about out-of-work hipsters, buxom astronauts, trailer trash and werewolves, one elegant-looking action fantasy stands out at the New York Television Festival. It’s called The Shadow Cabal, and it’s the only show being pitched where characters somberly intone dialog like, “They cursed the wrong elf.”
“The Shadow Cabal stands out because it is an earnest fantasy, something you just never see in the indie world,” series writer-producer Kynan Griffin told Wired in an e-mail. “If you look at literature and videogames, fantasy dominates the market. In cinema, more than half the top-grossing films are fantasy. The genre is grossly underrepresented on television.”
Griffin and Cabal co-creator Jason Faller are in New York this week hoping to sell their extravagant vision at the eighth-annual New York Television Festival. Running through Friday, the festival brings together show creators with talent buyers on the prowl for television projects.
The Shadow Cabal pilot started as a pitch for a web series, morphed into a standalone feature film and is now being used as a proof-of-concept for a TV series that draws on the epic fantasy world of role-playing games, according to its creators. Despite the raging success of the Lord of the Rings films and HBO’s Game of Thrones, such programming remains rare on television.
“In TV, every now and then a show like Game of Thrones or Xena or SyFy’s Merlin comes along,” Griffin said, emerging from an afternoon of pitch meetings at the festival. “Yet independent filmmakers are always more drawn to comedy, horror and drama.”
In contrast to the video verite style seen in NYTV trailers like Werewolf in a Girl’s Sorority, Life Sucks and Love’s a Bitch, Shadow Cabal sports an unapologetically lush look. (See the Shadow Cabal trailer below.) Kynan credits costume and design supervisor Anne Black for the handsome production values.
“She has a beautiful eye and is a stickler for quality,” he said. “I think costume and production design in general is often the downfall of many indie productions. The lack of quality sets and costumes make a film look cheap. We focus on what ends up on screen and spend the money on those elements.”
“We’re interested in re-creating the experience that role-playing gamers encounter every day.”
Griffin and Faller began making short films together while studying at Brigham Young University, then launched Arrowstorm Entertainment to produce feature-length fantasy product. They originally conceived Shadow Cabal’s environment of elves, orcs, giants and dragons as the setting for the Saga videogame.
If their proof-of-concept trailer gets picked up as a TV series, Griffin said, he and his partners are “interested in re-creating the experience that role-playing gamers encounter every day. So much fantasy cinema deals with kings and princesses saving the world, whereas gamers deal with a small group of heroes of different skillsets. Different races like dwarves, elves and orcs band together on quests for fortune and glory. It is a much more personal world, where anyone can become a hero, rather than just ‘the chosen one.’”
Most of Arrowstorm’s eight feature films so far have been funded through private equity along with revenues from DVD, video-on-demand and TV sales. For this project, Griffin and Faller are inviting fantasy addicts to help finance massive visual effects at the Shadow Cabal Kickstarter page.
“We pull no punches with regard to quality,” Griffin said. “Our motto is to make the film we’d love to watch.”
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