SHATTERED ILLUSIONS one-sheet poster: Maren and Toby Hale at a fog-wrapped dock beneath the title. He sailed into the fog to keep it from his door. The fog came anyway. Coming 2026.
A Rod & Staff Media Film · Coming 2026

SHATTERED
ILLUSIONS

He sailed into the fog to keep it from his door. The fog came anyway.

A stoker-turned-captain leads the last brass fleet into the fog against iron leviathans he knows he cannot beat — while his wife and son wait on the dock for a sea that gives nothing back.

Steampunk war film 21:9 · 3:44 Score Victor Lundberg
The story

The ones who wait

Saltgate is a dock-town at the mouth of a gray bay, in a world where steam won — brass ironclads in the harbor, airships above the fog, and lately, out past the shipping lanes, something else: black-iron leviathans the size of cathedrals, burning red in the murk. The Ironwake is coming.

Captain Aldous Hale came up from the boiler rooms — a stoker who learned to read a ship's heart before he ever commanded one. When the fleet sails to meet what cannot be beaten, he goes with it, because the harbor is behind him and the only way to keep the fog from his door is to meet it at sea.

On the dock, his wife Maren lights the lamp she has lit every night since the lamplighter quit. Beside her stands their son Toby, a brass spyglass in his coat pocket, watching the horizon the way his father taught him — reading the smoke. White is steam. Black is coal.

Red-black is a ship burning.

The Hales of Saltgate

Three of them. One harbor lamp.

Maren Hale — portrait of a woman in a once-fine wool coat, quiet strength and longing.
The one who waits
Maren Hale

Her name means "of the sea," and she has never once been on it. She wears the good coat from the year the yards were busy, and she will not let Saltgate watch the Hales come down. Every night, she lights the dock lamp herself — so the Kestrel can find the bay.

Captain Aldous Hale — portrait of a weathered naval captain, brass buttons and pressure gauges on his greatcoat.
The captain of the Kestrel
Aldous Hale

A stoker who became a captain — the two pressure gauges on his chest strap are the habit of a man who reads a ship's heart. His crew wear his family's uniform because he dressed them. He knows the leviathans cannot be beaten. He sails anyway.

Toby Hale — portrait of a boy in a patched wool coat and flat cap.
The one who reads the smoke
Toby Hale, 11

A brass spyglass lives in his coat pocket. He wants to be a stoker like his father was, and he has been sneaking down to the dock before dawn. He is old enough to know exactly what the smoke means — which is the cruelest thing about him.

The war

The last brass fleet against the Ironwake

A colossal black-iron leviathan war-machine emerging bow-first from a wall of sea fog, rows of red furnace glow.
The enemy is never a face. It is a red glow in the fog, getting closer.
A night naval battle in heavy fog — a warm-lit gunboat in the foreground, the leviathan's red rows behind.
The Kestrel meets the leviathan. The battle plays like a dream — you see the fires long before you hear them.
In production

First footage

Shot silent by design — the score owns the sound. The film is in production now; footage locks shot by shot.

The shore. Maren and Toby emerge as the fog thins — the film's opening.
The battle. The fog takes everything back but the glow.
For the curious: the production bible →

How this film is being made — the track that wrote the story, the beats, the world's laws, how the cast was created, the fog method, and the director's red pen on every frame.