In her first short animated film, animator Weronika Marianna brings to life memories of her grandmother’s house. The project is a tribute to her family history, but also an ode to all the small communities that in previous centuries lived not from but with nature. We witnessed the maker’s first experimental steps to explore and capture the folklore of her childhood in images.
As a child, Weronika Marianna spent every summer at her grandmother’s house in Poland. The house, which had no running hot water and was surrounded by wild strawberries, was demolished 20 years ago. Since then, it has lived on only in Weronika’s memory and imagination. With the project Dom (Polish for house), she aims to bring the place to life while telling a bigger story, about our memory and its inevitable loss.
Despite its strongly autobiographical nature, Weronika’s work also has a universal eloquence. The project is an ode to the folklore of small farming communities. Her grandmother’s family history symbolizes all the customs, traditions and stories of these previous generations that are forgotten if we do not pay attention to them.
Using hand-drawn sketch lines, cardboard and textiles, Weronika creates a world all her own, with which she aims to stir the viewer. In particular, she wants to evoke the feeling of experiencing contact with the past. She keeps searching and experimenting until her images hit just the right mood, matching the feeling grandma’s house evokes in her. Weronika wants to use music to further enhance this feeling and draw the viewer into the fate of past lives, and the memories and traditions lost with them. For this, she is collaborating with musician, singer and researcher of Polish folklore Dominika Oczepa and sound designer Louis Puggaard-Müller.
In Weronika’s work, experimentation plays an important role. During the making process, she embraces mistakes and small failures as a way to achieve something new. The starting grant from the Design Grant Scheme helps her, while experimenting, to get the animation film off the ground. The start-up phase of the project results in preliminary research and a storyboard, giving the animator a solid foundation to build on.
The follow-up project, the actual production of the animated film, is another huge task. Weronika works on the film frame by frame, which means that she needs about 25 frames for a single second. The traces of this manual process will be evident in the final result when it is ready. The vibrating lines, dancing colours and unfilled areas show the charm of her craft, according to the animator.
Weronika sees that the magic of hand-drawn animation is also being discovered by an increasingly large audience. Animation and film festivals, such as Kaboom Animation Festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam, devote plenty of attention to the genre, and she also notices interest from another quarter: musicians commission experimental, handmade visuals, creating a new audience of enthusiasts. For example, Weronika previously made this music video for British multi-instrumentalist, producer and singer-songwriter Cosmo Sheldrake.
