The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello

I may have posted this before, but I’ve been thinking about it lately. Great story. Great animation. Steampunk at its finest.

Here’s the synopsis:

Nominated for an Oscar and for a BAFTA award, Jasper Morello is a short feature made in a unique style of silhouette animation developed by director Anthony Lucas and inspired by the work of authors Edgar Alan Poe and Jules Verne. In the frontier city of Carpathia, Jasper Morello discovers that his former adversary Doctor Claude Belgon has returned from the grave. When Claude reveals that he knows the location of the ancient city of Alto Mea where the secrets of life have been discovered, Jasper cannot resist the temptation to bring his own dead wife Amelia back.

But they are captured by Armand Forgette, leader of the radical Horizontalist anti-technology movement, who is determined to reanimate his terrorist father Vasco. As lightning energises the arcane machineries of life in the floating castle of Alto Mea, Jasper must choose between having his beloved restored or seeing the government of Gothia destroyed. Set in a world of iron dirigibles and steam powered computers, this gothic horror mystery tells the story of Jasper Morello, a disgraced aerial navigator who flees his Plague-ridden home on a desperate voyage to redeem himself.

For more on this world, visit here.

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Steampunk Education

Steampunk right there in Seattle Image by Jessica Palmer at bioephemera.com

I posted the other day on my need to be better read in the steampunk genre (Since then I’ve received The Difference Engine and Boneshaker and have them piled comfortably on my desk, ready for reading). In addition, for the last seven or eight months I’ve periodically surfed the internet for information on anything from steam engines to dirigible flight to static electricity to historical Mediterranean commerce. I can’t say that I’ve understood everything I’ve read, but the time I’ve spent researching these things has been in an effort to inform Shadow of the Black City with believable, yet fantastic elements. If presented in the way I hope, those strange, yet somehow familiar things will be fun to read and imagine.

Lavie Tidhar explains the draw of steampunk in his guest post  at the SF Signal website:

Technology has always been a kind of magic. And our lives today are suffused with a magic we can rarely fully comprehend. The Internet, mobile phones, reusable launch vehicles (RLVs), jet planes and stealth bombers, GPS and smart bombs, Google and Twitter and Facebook, PCs, satellites and a forty-year old flag on the moon… technological advances expand exponentially, and Victorian London represents the moment when technology exploded beyond a single person’s ability to understand the mechanisms underlying it.

The thread of burgeoning technology and the wonders and fears it evokes can be woven throughout countless stories and myriad themes. I like this flexibility because there is so much that can be done with it from alternate history to fantasy to retro sci-fi.