Berserker is a proof of concept for a film about Captain Albert Ball — Britain’s first household name of the air and the most decorated British ace of the First World War.

Ball was just 18 when he began his short, intense career in the skies over Europe. In only fifteen months of combat, he scored 44 victories and became a national hero before becoming disoriented in a cloud and crashing to his death in May of 1917. He was 20 years old.

My first encounter with the pilots of World War I came when I was twelve years old, sitting in front of a Magnavox 286 computer playing the flight simulator Red Baron.

Years later, when I began experimenting with AI filmmaking, those early aviators returned to mind.

What struck me most was the youth of the pilots. Many of them were barely out of their teens. Most had never even seen an airplane before the war. Yet they were suddenly expected to master a brand-new and largely untested invention, flying thousands of feet above the earth while firing a machine gun at other young men who were just as frightened as they were.

Albert Ball became the focus of this piece not because of his victory count, but because of his ambivalence about it.

In letters to his father, Ball begged him not to send his younger brother into the war. He wrote that he had grown tired of “living to kill” and was “beginning to feel like a murderer.”

Despite his fame, Ball lived apart from the other pilots. His life was about as solitary as one could make it on an airfield. He built a small wooden hut with his own hands and planted a vegetable garden outside it, spring onions and radishes.

His comrades remembered him standing outside in the evenings, playing violin by the light of a red flare, accompanying a recording of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony on a gramophone he kept in his hut.

This film attempts to portray not only Ball’s victories, but the contradictions of his life: a young man caught between duty, fame, and a growing unease with the violence he had become famous for.

Ball earned his pilot’s wings in January of 1916. Fifteen months later, he was dead at twenty years old.

Berserker is also my first serious experiment in AI-assisted filmmaking.

The piece was created using a combination of Kling 3.0 for video generation and Nano Banana for image generation and visual development. I used reference imagery and start/end frame techniques to control motion and continuity between shots.

From the beginning, I wanted the film to feel cinematic rather than “AI-generated.” To achieve that, I composed the piece in a 21:9 aspect ratio, mimicking the widescreen language of contemporary cinema while grading the images to evoke early twentieth-century photography.

Historical accuracy was also essential to the project.

Every aircraft depicted in the film, from the Nieuport 17 to the German Albatros fighters, reflects real aircraft that would have been present in Ball’s theater of combat. Particular attention was paid to Ball’s distinctive fighting method, including his Lewis gun mounted on a Foster mount, which allowed him to fire upward at enemy aircraft from beneath.

While this film is only a proof of concept, the goal was to demonstrate how emerging AI tools can be used not just to generate images, but to construct historically grounded, emotionally resonant visual storytelling.