Part ONE
It’s a strange and intense
experience to make a short film. Choosing to make a film that surrounds Romania
and Turkey in Los Angeles is a venture that isn’t guaranteed to yield something
worthwhile. At first glance the story we selected is well saturated, but that
was almost the appeal. Picking the Vlad Tepes story is guaranteed to bring
attention, positive or negative, the story itself is electric and for centuries
has carried a desire people have for this strange man.
There was a desire, on our part, to
make something unique that scratched a certain itch. It was building a bridge
over the gulf of our ideas was what proved difficult. Each choice made is done
through a friction we are forced to ride. The tension is not between one
another but rather our ideas brought down into the harsh reality of our limited
technological and financial resources. It became clear that an animation would
be cheaper and more immediately achievable option.
Our story was complicated from the
start. Ideas that straddled distinct eras of history and regions of the world,
we had to start narrowing down the ideas. It was an early decision that the
idea had to be something we could create that was different and the way to do
that was to approach a well-known idea in a new way. What is a more universally
known story than Dracula? For years
people have dug into what inspired the original novel but rarely had any delved
into the actual torment of the man who originated the circumstance.
Rather than letting this film end
up telling Vlad’s story like a studio would, we could see something in this
story just below the surface that would take us to much more buried within.
We began, like most people, on
Google; scrolling images of the landscapes that make up the area the story
covered. Alongside dragging up images we liked we started to pull the images so
I could immediately begin to write. The essential elements of this story we
felt needed hitting were the rejection and expulsion from family, growing up in
an alien world and a building resentment to see how all of this story helped make
our character one of the most fascinating in human history.
Eventually an idea that didn’t last
long ended up tying us down to a central focus of Vlad’s past. For weeks I felt
like we were spinning wheels, as I would write a short bit or Erdy would bring
sheets of his sketches--
But after each meeting the new
batch of photos and new piles of writings pushed out what we came in with from the
week before as a new part was thought up. Memories of trips Erdy took as a
child to the region along with my reaction to it seeming like an unreal space
lead to us wanting to spend most of our time in Turkey. 
