In the open.

The first full treatment is written — a scene-level outline, around five thousand words, braiding three perspectives (the ship, the deck, London) that only converge at the end of the film. Three questions open at the synopsis stage are now closed.

The protagonist and Equiano do not meet on screen. Their connection is implied through the maritime Black-Atlantic network of dockworkers, deckhands, and freed Black sailors through whom news of the Zong reached London. The audience sees testimony being carried; the camera never names the carriers. There is no evidence any Zong survivor spoke directly to Equiano, and dramatizing a meeting would soften the specific horror the film is built around.

Sharp's defeat in Gregson v Gilbert is the denouement, not the climax. The climax is the massacre itself. The courtroom is a stated, quiet beat near the end — a historical fact noted and moved past. The film is not about Sharp winning or losing. It is about the record forming.

The Jamaica third act is held briefly, twice. Once at the end of the Atlantic crossing — the ship arrives, the survivors are offloaded into a chattel-slavery economy that does not end for decades. Once more in a coda, years on, the protagonist in a single scene of ordinary life. No long epilogue, no softening descent.

The treatment lives in the production folder; the sources list and the character sheets are the next pass.

Three load-bearing claims in the production's internal register upgraded today from “pending excerpt” to “excerpted,” using the Walvin monograph, Hoare's nineteenth-century Memoirs of Granville Sharp, and the standard scholarly consensus on the Zong's origin.

The ship was not purchased at Cape Coast Castle, as an earlier draft of the ledger implied — it was the Dutch slaver Zorg, captured by the British on 10 February 1781 during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and acquired by the Liverpool-based Gregson syndicate. Zong is a transcription of the Dutch name, not a formal renaming. Correction logged.

Granville Sharp's diary entry of 19 March 1783 — the first contemporary record of Equiano's visit — is now carried in the ledger with Walvin's transcription: “Gustavas Vasa a Negro called on me with an account of 130 Negroes being thrown Alive into the sea from on Board an English Slave Ship.” Direct inspection at the Gloucestershire Archives is still required before any on-screen reproduction, but the film's dramatization is now anchored to the same number (“more than one hundred and thirty”) that Sharp himself recorded.

Still blocking: the full text of the 18 March 1783 anonymous letter in The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser. It lives in the Burney Collection at the British Library and is not yet digitally accessible. Until we have it in facsimile, nothing from the letter can be reproduced directly in the film or on this site.

The site now carries five images: a hero background, three triptych panels (ship, deck, London), and a social-share card. All were generated through text-to-image models from prompts written against the film's dignity rules: no human faces, no figurative violence, no reproduction of real historical persons, no shot of a body meeting water.

These are not production stills. They are atmospheric placeholders — a wet oak hull, a rain-slick deck, a Georgian London desk under candlelight — chosen to let the project be visible on the public web before the first finished scene exists. When the first proper shot of the film is cut, these will come down.

The decision to publish temporary visuals at all was deliberate. A site this early that carries only text reads as pre-production vapor. A site that carries fully rendered characters would overstate what has been decided. The images we chose split the difference: material, period, textural — surfaces, not people.

The anonymous letter in the Morning Chronicle on 18 March 1783 — the one that first put the massacre into public view — is a historically contested document. Scholarship divides between three positions: Equiano wrote it; Granville Sharp wrote it or something close; the author is unknown and unknowable.

The film's dramatization statement names a specific choice: Equiano writes the letter, calls on Sharp the day after publication, and Sharp carries the campaign into the Admiralty. Every event in that version is in the record. The ambiguity is kept visible in the production notes and in the sources list, not hidden under a false certainty.

This website is up before the first scene is cut. That is deliberate. A project like this one — a serious historical drama made with AI assistance, about a case where the human cost was deliberately reduced to a count on an insurance writ — earns its place by making the record visible as it is being made, not after.

Expect this journal to be modest. One or two entries a month. Decisions that matter, trade-offs we had to make, mistakes we had to fix. If something here looks wrong, write to hello@gigamega.ca.