Berserker.
A cinematic portrait of Albert Ball, VC — the twenty-year-old British flying ace who grew vegetables between sorties, played Schubert's Unfinished Symphony on his gramophone at the airfield, and wrote home that he was beginning to feel like a murderer. The film sits inside the contradiction. Not the triumph. The quiet dissociation behind the medals.
Albert Ball was a different kind of fighter pilot. He flew mostly alone. He refused to wear a helmet. He lived in a hut at the edge of the airfield instead of the officers' mess, and he kept vegetable gardens at every base he was stationed at. On the night he went missing, he'd been writing home about onions.
Forty-four kills in fifteen months. Posthumous Victoria Cross. He was twenty years old. By most accounts, he was a shy religious boy who happened to be extraordinary at a thing he didn't want to be doing.
Most stories about WWI aces lean into glory. This one doesn't. The piece is about the gap between what Ball did in the sky and who he was on the ground — the split that lets a sensitive young man become something called "Berserker" for long enough to fly one more mission, then go back to writing about peas.
The score is Schubert's Unfinished — not a dramatic choice, a historical one. It's documented that Ball played it on his gramophone between sorties. The story was pre-assembled by history. The job was to find it and get out of its way.
I only scrap because it is my duty. I am really beginning to feel like a murderer.
The film opens on bass — a single sustained note, Schubert's low cello figure — over the airfield. It builds through three tight vignettes: arrival, the kill, the hut. Three orchestral hits inside those sequences carry the weight the dialogue never has to. A red flare. A violin by flarelight. The title card.
No narration. No exposition. The research is all in the frame — the right Nieuport, the right insignia, the right tent, the right face. I wanted a viewer who knew nothing about Albert Ball to leave the film knowing the one thing that mattered: that he was carrying something that didn't fit.
Writer, director, editor. Sound design and final conform.
Produced using a combination of generative video and image models alongside traditional post — Premiere Pro for edit, Photoshop for plate work, ElevenLabs for sound. Every shot was iterated, not prompted once.
Submitted to the Runway AI Film Festival. Boosted on LinkedIn to creative directors nationally, where it generated conversations with agency and in-house leaders about craft-forward work in an AI-native production pipeline.