Well, I didn't get everything done in time. My reasoning for this is that although I am a very fast animator, I have a habit of rushing scenes under a deadline and most of it ends up looking like crap. Instead I opted for my final film to only complete each shot to the point where I was totally happy with it before moving on. This resulted in about 60 - 70% of the movie being completed, but considering it's a six minute film made by one person doing a one hundred credit point year (while my peers only did eighty), I did pretty well. Not to mention Okki the Octopus blew totally out of proportion and ended up dominating my first semester with twenty one minutes of animation to complete - fast, budget symbol-based animation as opposed to my more careful, considered, thorough approach to Wünderkind.
At the end of the day, all I could do was my best and this is it. This film may be incomplete but I'm damn proud of it. The story is perfect. Four redrafts have rendered the original script practically unreadable as this film has evolved from a flight of fancy to a considered piece of speculative fiction. I decided to take a leaf out of my hero Peter Chung's book and flick the 'V' to conventional Hollywood scriptwriting by writing a film where the protagonist is the villain, a vile maniac to be sympathised with, and though he eliminates his adversary, he is defeated, not victorious. I wish to carry this odd storytelling methodology into all my future works.
You don't mess with killer ten-foot Russian robots.
Victor, the eponymous Wünderkind, who appears as much as a villain as a victim.
Lajos Farenczy has gone between scripts from a one-shot nobody, to a weaselly scapegoat, to a valiant antagonist to the evil Kaiser.
Hatticus is technically the true villain of the piece, and yet it is never revealed whether the character truly exists. Is it an alien? An apparition? Or a mere figment of Victor's tortured imagination?
Poor Victor is so disturbed, even his imaginary friend is a predatory bully.
This scene was improved drastically by the addition of a painted background.
The credits sequence is by far my favourite part of the film. It is a bizarre send-up of patriotism; an American war chant and patriotic icon played out by German cyborgs.
The support everyone has given to me in the making of this film has been nothing short of breath-taking.
Thank you to everyone who believed in me and wanted me to succeed. I am utterly grateful.
