'Domovoi and Kikimora' is a literal narrative inspired by Slavic mythology and the house deities Kikimora and Domovoi. A little girl, asleep in her bed, has her house raided by Kikimora and Domovoi, who are scavenging for food. Domovoi accidentally wakes the little girl up, and the girl instinctively knows who could be in the house, and that to see either of these house gods in the flesh will bring about a terrible omen, such as her death at the hands of these gods. Domovoi and Kikimora are essentially primal scavengers at heart, but have a deep sense of duty to their roles as house gods, and are drawn to the girls room to check whether she is awake so they can act accordingly. The film is currently ending on an ambiguous note, whereby the gods enter the little girl's bedroom, Kikimora begins to use the spinning wheel, and Domovoi sits on the edge of the girl's bed. The last shot is the girl's face as she opens her eyes. This film is another collaboration between Nicola Everill and Lily Goodchild. We have been planning this film since spring/summer 2012 and it has developed considerably since we first started creating our characters and their story. We have been living with the idea of this film for some time and, luckily, are not exhausted by it yet. If anything, we can't wait to get started. By concentrating on one character each for a short film project last term (one minute long Studio Mentor Project) enabled us to discover different materials for construction and some different ways to make films.




Last term, Nicola made an experimental time-lapse of the construction of Domovoi, where she literally started with the skeleton of the character, then added muscles, skin and hair. Domovoi was 'brought to life' through the time-lapse, and allowed Nicola to patiently animate for over a month, using different materials (such as synthetic hair and spray paint) and to simply, enjoy the process of creating a character.










I (Lily Goodchild) made a condensed, abstracted version of the story that we had planned to do for this next project. I became drawn to the idea that the little girl's dream self would be aware of its surroundings, and would be so frightened of Kikimora's appearance that it would dive back into the girl's head to hide. I also used implication rather than explicit reveals of Kikimora, so when you watch the film you are not certain who or what Kikimora actually is, but you get a general idea of her connection to the spinning wheel and her daunting presence.

Monday, 8 April 2013

Movement Tests

After what seemed to be a long Easter itching to get cracking on with our FMP. Me and Lily did some simple movement tests today with both our puppet Domovoi and Kikimora.




I concentrated on testing how Domovoi could crawl across the floor, as his belly is particularly large its rather difficult to get him to bend his knee and literally crawl. So I had to improvise by having him drag himself across the floor. Completed on 2's as a warm up into animating again.






Lily completed this animation with Kikimora, to see how we can effectively make her walk with chicken legs. Having a rig helped to stabilise her movements more, as her legs don’t allow for much stability.



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