A more refined sketch of Lajos Ferency. I'm still yet to finalise his design, but I think I'm onto something here.

Preparing myself for a bit of a 'check up' tomorrow. Unfortunately I haven't made up as much to show as I would have liked (specifically thanks to my WIL Project, see my other blog for details), but I'm making progress and I will show what I have.

The biggest piece of progress I have made is that I am now onto my fourth and definitely final draft for the script, thanks to James Lee's valuable and sharp input. James had a lot to say about my third draft, all of which I agreed with, and yet amazingly it had fallen under the radars of everyone else who had proofread it, including myself.

As soon as Okki has been dispelled, work will officially begin on The Rise Of Kaiser Fate, and I don't intend to tread lightly here. In the best case scenario I will make a good start on production before the mid-year holidays.

This is it. Draft three has been completed and it's tighter, faster and stronger than ever. Our pre production pack is a stone's throw away and so I intend to get stuck in immediately now that I have finally consolidated my story.
The film also has a new title, "The Rise of Kaiser Fate".

I made the decision today that Kuba K. should do the music for the "present" timeline set in Budapest while I will take on the musical duties for the "flashback" scenes. These will keep the segments as separated musically as they are visually which will strengthen the contrast nicely. The music for the flashbacks will be more surreal and experimental, while the Budapest scenes will be of a more epic "film score" nature.

Two more collaborators have entered the fray, Alexander Iveszics and Anherro Reich. Alex is a Hungarian and I have been discussing the script with him to strengthen the authenticity of the look and feel of Budapest, as well as accuracy with choice of names and the occasional word spoken in Hungarian, and of course, he is acting as my speech coach - I am voice acting Ferenczy Lajos, the fictional Prime Minister of Hungary that I have created for this alternative history, and I want his accent to be as authentic as possible.
Meanwhile, I have been in consultation with Anherro Reich, who is a Technical Sergeant specialising in aircraft, regarding the Kaiser's airship - the 'Genghis Khan'.
I wanted the ship to be physically possible, and so its design has gone from vague and fantastical to aerodynamically sound, theoretically possible and much more solid. The new more realistic design is a lot cooler than the airy scribblings I started out with.

Finally, I have been doing my homework and performing some research on the topography of Budapest (particularly around the Parliament Building area) and have aquired several excellent reference shots for both the inside and out of the building.

Major story developments

That's the face I pulled when I realised how long it's been since I updated my blogs.

In terms of actual production or pre production work, I have not progressed very far at all with my final film, though importantly (and this should come first anyway), I have made some absolutely major developments with my story.

First of all, the present timeline is now a focused three-act structure. There are much stronger parallels between events which are happening in the present timeline and those that happened in the past - more than simply graphic matches, these parallels are now deeper at a subtext level and give the conclusion of the present storyline (which barely existed in my previous two drafts) a much more sinister impact.

On that note, this was going to be a dark film to begin with, but draft three - by far the greatest development of the story so far - is going to be unbearably dark in nature. It shows, unflinchingly, young Victor's downward spiral into madness and his unwitting transformation into his wicked father.

The biggest change stylistically is how Hatticus Doomsbury is represented, or rather, how it is not. Now delegated to the role of 'imaginary friend' - a kind of demented parody of Drop Dead Fred - Hatticus D. is only suggested, its face never fully shown, its body phasing between shapes seamlessly, even bonelessly. It is also very pedophilic in this new draft, even more so than in the previous two scripts. Hatticus D. is a monster that preys upon the weak and defenseless Victor - a monster, as we later discover, of his own making.

Now that I have locked down the changes that I wanted and have finally secured a much more powerful ending, I am ready to complete the third (and hopefully final) draft of my script and begin solid pre-production work. Stylistically and narratively, the film is finally coming to a head.