Historical Story

Artists' Statement

       Several outside media sources were influential in the process of writing our script. Some of these sources were the recent Sherlock Holmes films. The character of Sherlock, who is a misunderstood genius reminded us of Nikola Tesla a bit. From this connection we remembered that Sherlock would test many experiments on Watson’s dog and it would appear at times that Sherlock had killed the dog. This led us to develop Mr. Howard into a dog lover who has his dogs killed through accidents associated with Tesla’s experiment.  Another outside media source which influenced us was the film The Lady and the Tramp. This influence is seen through the allusion to the film with the two dogs eating spaghetti together.   

We also were inspired by “Jack-Jack Attacks.” We liked the idea of Tesla’s neighbor being this innocent person who gets in way over their head in dealing with someone who is more like a force of nature than a human. The babysitter is terrified of Jack-Jack but continues watching him out of duty. We wanted a similar relationship, in that Mr. Howard, the neighbor, is too afraid of Tesla to sit down and talk with him about some of his grievances. At the same time he can’t move, at least not right away. We imagined if the script ever got developed that the short film would be a silent movie with most of the information being conveyed visually instead of with title cards. 

The reading that influenced us the most was the story about the man who thought the photograph of his grandma was about his mother. It was influential because while we wrote about experiments that Tesla conducted, most of them were conducted later in his life or never at all, in the case of the death ray. We decided that it would be more fun to have these outlandish experiments in the story and that they also contributed to the cartoony tone of the script.