Having directed numerous music-videos and commercials, THE SECRET BOX marks the international Drama Short-Film Debut for Austrian creator G.S. Leitgeb – with his current feature film in development, pursuing the same vibe, pace & colour. Following in the footsteps of well-known masters T. Burton, G. del Toro and W. Anderson, G.S. Leitgeb combines his work as writer, designer and director – moulding a fictional world filled with adventure, fantasy & mystery. Garnished with a sense of slapstick-comedy as the cherry on top. Inside the Dublin & Vienna based World-Building Studio KTC®Slingshot, he’s leading a Team of Creatives formerly involved in The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, Penny Dreadful or A Series of Unfortunate Events – offering services for writing, design and directing.
This journey about discovering something hidden, ancient and buried, with its secrets only waiting to be unlocked, feeds our universal hunger for curiosity. Its stories, characters and objects move us back to the days where we used to hang out in treehouses and spent hours dreaming up dangerous adventures, only to come home late – dirty and bruised, but a tick wiser. Those happy days where fantasy and imagination ruled our world, and emotions were floating so effortlessly.
With its quirky designs, its eccentric characters and its twisted story-lines, THE SECRET BOX triggers our senses for retro, nostalgia and playfulness; inviting us to experience the world through the eyes of an innocent kid.
To go into great detail during the process of writing & development was vital for the creation of an authentic and wide-spread world. It doesn’t stop with the characters and stages. Fictional bodies, organisations and objects needed their own branding and identity – such as the ‘Peltzer Publishing Group’ – a fictional distribution company that runs a newspaper and is in cahoots with the secret Can Society. Or the company Straussman Werke Gmbh, which is dealing with all kinds of scientific gadgets in providing the equipment for The KTC® Time Jumper Program. When building a timeline from 1600 towards 1985, all of these things needed to be thought through to finally connect them with the events happening on The Secret Box.
The entire making of The Secret Box involved around 60 international Creatives plus 20 additional heads who worked as consulters in the back. For such a short format entertainment which is as complex as it is new, with all its different media-channels and story-parts, that is a lot of people to be held together. Right on top, you constantly have to keep an eye on not to loose focus of ‘the bigger picture’.
Fantasy/Sci-Fi FILM & WRITING FESTIVAL 