The Project

Somewhere in North Africa in 1943, a young American sat half-awake outside a canvas tent drinking burnt coffee from a dented cup while the desert wind pushed dust through camp.

No battle.

No orchestra.

No dramatic charge across a battlefield.

Just another morning in a war that you don’t see in the movies.

We’ve all seen the great recreations of World War II that Hollywood has given us: storming the beaches at Normandy, holding the line in Bastogne. And honestly, I can’t get enough of them.

But I’ve always found myself wondering about the rest of it.

What happened in between those moments?

Did the world just stop moving when history wasn’t being made?

Someone once said that war is “countless hours of boredom punctuated by flashes of excitement.”

And maybe that’s true.

But what about those countless hours?

The letters home.

The watches held when nobody attacked.

The mornings spent shaving from a steel helmet.

The cigarettes smoked sitting on an ammunition crate.

The heat.

The dust.

The waiting.

For every man on the front, dozens more were somewhere behind him keeping the machine moving.

And what about their stories?

The ones that never made it to Hollywood, but still shaped the lives of an entire generation.

For years, I’ve tried to reconstruct my grandfather’s war through letters, records, old photographs, Army reports, and the places his unit passed through. I’ve stood where they stood in North Africa and Europe nearly eighty years after they left.

And eventually I realized something.

The mind fills gaps.

You read enough letters home and eventually you start painting pictures on a blank canvas. You start imagining the sound of the camp at night. What the bunks looked like at Fort Bragg. What his mess kit looked like sitting beside him in Mostaganem.

And then I started wondering:

What if we could see it?

Not the war as Hollywood remembered it.

The war as somebody lived it.

That’s where Sully’s War came from.

It follows James Sullivan, a modern man who suddenly finds himself trapped in 1941 after what was supposed to be nothing more than a WWII vlog.

In some ways, the story steps further away from reality than anything I’ve ever created.

But strangely, in other ways, it gets closer.

Because James asks the same questions I would ask.

He notices the things we would notice.

The boredom.

The confusion.

James Sullivan isn’t real.

But the world around him was.

The units.

The camps.

The ships.

The towns.

The men writing letters home wondering if anybody would ever read them again.

Sully’s War uses AI to tell an impossible story, one that I’ve been imagining for years while following my grandfather’s path across Europe and North Africa.

Not to replace or rewrite history.

Just to get closer to it.

Because most stories from that generation are forgotten with the people who lived them.

This project is my attempt to give a few of those moments a camera before they disappear completely.