For the past year and a half, I’ve been working on this project trying to learn as much as I could about Storyboarding and how to tell a good story. I chose to work on Vasalisa for my master's thesis because it is a folktale I grew up with and it has a very special place in my heart, I adapted the tale and created a 16min storyboard for it. Here is the final video and the making of Vasalisa!
When I was little my mom would read to me a Russian folktale from the book Women Who Run With the Wolves (by Clarissa Pinkola Estés) called Vasalisa. It follows Vasalisa while she overcomes obstacles with the help of a doll dressed just like her that was a gift from her dying mother. After it in the book, Clarissa gives an analysis of the story based on Jungian psychoanalysis. According to her, the doll works as Vasalisa’s intuition and connects each character to a part of a person’s psyche. I always loved this interpretation, and I wanted it to be more explicit into the story, so I spent a lot of time writing the script and changing important points in the story that I will focus more later on. Writing the script made me think visually. In the beginning, I would describe feelings and thoughts almost as a novel, but that didn’t help me at all when it came to drawing the scenes. I had to keep in mind that I should put on paper only what could be seen or heard.
I chose to explore storyboards in this project. It is a part of the film production pipeline that especially appeals to me because it is the combination of my passions- storytelling and drawing. Storyboards are the blueprint of a movie and are also a playground of ideas. It is meant to be quick so you can experiment and change a lot, and it focuses more on the composition, acting, and pose than in how clean the drawing is. I was amazed by all the possibilities that storyboards hold and started researching. I found out about the industry-standard software Storyboard Pro (@toonboomanimation) and started learning it. It was a great challenge because I was learning everything on the fly!
Vasalisa is the main character. In the original, there is not much about her appearance but it has a very specific description of her clothes and I tried to be true to the original and kept the skirt, apron, red boots, and vest in their specific color. I imagined that she was more contained in her body gestures, but had a more expressive face. Her base shapes are circles and rectangles.
First drawing of Vasalisa
Vasilisa’s parents have a brief appearance but they are important since the mother gives her the doll and the father connects her to the next part of the story. They had simple but wholesome designs.
The doll is a representation of Vasalisa’s intuition that is why she is dressed like Vasalisa. I referenced real dolls for her design because I wanted it to be clear that she is still a doll and not a mini human. I chose to not give her a mouth and she doesn’t speak because as intuition she has a particular way to communicate that is not as clear as speech.
Baba Yaga is a very powerful witch and is associated with many other stories, not only Vasalisa’s. She is a character often represented as evil and frightening but at the same time, Baba is a word used for grandma in the countries where the story is told. Since in this version she is not all good or all bad, and in some ways helps Vasalisa, the visual balance was important to me. So her base shapes are circles (friendly) and triangles (danger).
In the story, there are a few secondary characters just as intriguing as the main ones, like Baba Yaga’s house and the three Knights. Baba Yaga’s house is famous for its chicken legs and I couldn’t resist making it actually behave like a chicken! I tried to make the shape of the house resemble the body and the roof work like the wings. The knights represent the day (white), the sunrise (red) and the night (black) and help to show the passage of time.
Their names are Margaret (the stepmother) and Marnie (the stepsister) and they are the quintessential evil characters. Margaret is deeply annoyed by anyone and anything that is not herself. Marnie is spoiled and doesn’t think too hard about anything. I was inspired not only by the classical combo from Cinderella but also by the characters by Roald Dahl: Ms. Trunchbull from Matilda and Spiker and Sponge from James and the Giant Peach.
First drawings of them
This is the intro of my story, by far the part I spent the most time working on. The second video is the first idea
I ever had to start this story, it follows exactly what is described in the book, but visually it doesn’t work as well. After a LOT of time and different versions, I ended up with the first video. I chose to keep the first phrase because it is so mysterious, and then let the night guide us into Baba Yaga’s house and let her invite us to hear the story. Still, I bring the two videos because it would be interesting to see, just for the striking difference,
but also as a reminder that nothing is great in the first try, and even if it is you will only know it after
doing more of it.
Old
New
Now I would like to share some scenes I really liked to work on. This one was made to show how the stepmother and stepsister treat Vasalisa. I experimented with different camera angles and really pushed my understanding of perspective.
In the original story Baba Yaga says she will only give fire to Vasalisa if she performs a few tasks for her.I kept the first one the same as in the book (separate poppy seeds from dirt) but changed the others. The second task and I chose Irises because in some flower dictionaries irises mean wisdom, it is a nod to the fact that this story is also known as Vasalisa the Wise. I also changed the fact that the doll solves everything for Vasalisa, in my version the doll appears beside tools, but it is up to Vasalisa to listen to it and create the solutions.
The third task doesn’t actually exist in the original story. Vasalisa is granted the fire after saying that she has a blessing from her mom (aka the doll). In my version I wanted Vasalisa to be granted the fire not because something she had in the beginning but for something that she learns through her experience. I also always felt that Vasalisa had very little agency, and I wanted to give her that. So in the final task Vasalisa must say no to Baba Yaga.
First Task
Second Task
Third Task
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