A group of Texas filmmakers has made a feature-length comedy-drama about a man slowly turning into a crab, and now they need help getting it across the finish line. The team behind In Waves has launched a Kickstarter campaign to pay for the final stages of post-production, the step that takes raw edited footage and makes it ready for a theater screen.
The absurdist dramedy, which wrestles with grief as much as it goes for laughs, follows Elliot Sauer, a woman who likes to have a plan for everything. Then doctors diagnose her husband, Kevin, with Mancini's Disease, a rare illness that gradually transforms him into a crab. Friends and family start mourning Kevin while he's still in the room. Elliot won't. To her, the crab remains the man she married, and her fight to hold on to their life together forces her to face what love can't fix.
San Antonio filmmaker Steve Sanders wrote the film with Joe Fuentes and Sarah Yoakley. Sanders and Fuentes shared directing duties, Sanders and Yoakley produced, and Yoakley stars in the lead role.
The project traces back to Sanders' sketch comedy days at Austin's Fallout Theater. There, he and Yoakley performed a sketch called "Crab Claw," which Sanders later turned into a short film that played festivals.
"Crab Claw was just pure comedy. There was nothing emotional," Sanders says of the short. Fans kept pushing him to make more crab stories.
The movie is billed as funny, but also deals with Sanders' very real grief after losing his dad. Photo courtesy of Steve Sanders
The emotional side came from a much harder and unexpected place, according to Sanders, when his father died several years ago. As he looked for a way to channel all of this grief into a story, he faced a problem.
"I don't favor dramatic films, so I was like, how can I also make it kind of funny?" Sanders asked himself.
His answer merged both ideas — a man slowly morphing into a crab to represent losing someone you love.
"Certain emotions more accessible if you're able to laugh at them," Sanders says.
Early viewers even laughed at some scenes the team played straight, because they recognized their own experiences on screen, he says.
Austin actors and improvisers fill most of the film's roughly 30 speaking roles. The cast includes Yoakley's improv castmates from the local troupe All Night All Night All Night, Isaac Garza and Kyle Romero, along with Kelsey Prabilski, Stevie Marceaux, Kaci Beeler, and longtime Austin actor John Merriman. The crew shot at multiple locations around town including El Mercado, Yoakley's South Austin home, and a courtroom inside a Sixth Street law firm.
The crab itself is a real animatronic. David Amaral, a high school friend of Sanders and Fuentes who works in tech and builds robots for fun, spent about a year and a half making four crabs for the shoot.
The crabs used in the movie are actually four animatronic crabs designed and operated by David Amaral. Photo courtesy of Steve Sanders
Now that filming is completely done, the team needs at least $12,000 to finish the job. The money will cover sound effects, an original score, audio mixing, visual effects work, color grading and picture polish, and festival entry fees. If the campaign raises more than post-production requires, Sanders says "any extra money we raise will just go to raising awareness for the movie, hopefully making a bigger splash somewhere."
The team expects to wrap post-production by the end of December with a hopeful screening in Austin and one in San Antonio by January. Then they'll submit the film to festivals and ultimately plan to release the movie themselves.
As of writing, the Kickstarter stands at about $11,400 and has 15 days to go. To support In Waves, visit the film's Kickstarter page.
