CALGARY -- The Ballad of Sharkasaurus continues.

With filming and post-production of the Alberta-based western horror movie now complete, it has been accepted into the Blood in the Snow Film Festival which will air on Super Channel later this month.

"It's really funny," said writer and director Spencer Estabrooks.

"There's always stuff that changes, I wrote the beginning into and outro scene with a little more detail but we were just so rushed for time we had to end up improvising. I kind of like what I shot better than what I wrote."

Along with being making the film available to a North America-wide audience, being accepted into a film festival means Sharkasaurus can now be nominated for the Canadian Screen Awards.

"It's kind of a cool thing," said Estabrooks.

Normally held in Toronto each year, Estabrooks says the Blood in the Snow Film Festival is the largest genre-based festival in Canada.

"Now it's playing across Canada on Super Channel, which has the potential to have a lot more people watching it," he said. "It will be a bigger audience."

The online festival runs Oct. 28 to Nov. 7.

The brainchild of Estabrooks, Sharkasaurus was originally conceived as a 10-minute short film after he won the first-ever TELUS Storyhive prize.

Thr short developed a minor cult following after touring film festivals around the globe, leading to the creation of a graphic novel with the help of Renegade Arts Entertainment based in Canmore. A nearly three-metre high cardboard cut-out was created, and Estabrooks and crew spent the next year taking the book and Sharkasaurus to horror and comic conventions.

For the movie, the 14-metre Sharkasuarus suit was designed and built by artist Brian Cooley, who is best known for sculpting life-sized dinos for the Royal Tyrrell Museum and National Geographic

The storyline involves a group of coal miners who unearth a Sharkasaurus — a half-megalodon, half-tyrannosaurus — in the Badlands of central Alberta, which then wreaks havoc on the town of Drumheller and its inhabitants.

Filming of the 14-minute feature took two days, which was done at CL Ranch west of Calgary, which was once home to productions like Lonesome Dove and Hell on Wheels.