Lili's film - style and inspiration

Hi everyone and welcome to my new blog! Here I'm going to tell you about my stop motion films, all about how the magic happens.

For the past year I've been working on my independent short film "Lili", a stop motion puppet film.

I've made all the sets and characters along with Tom Kouris, who made the puppet armatures and also made the animation and photography.

The film is about a girl who's stuck in her childhood and refuses to let it go. She doesn't enjoy her childhood, she just sits on the roof of her deserted house and guards her stuff from the wind that comes to take it. The wind is very powerful, it forces her to chase after it and makes her get into another world, where she manages to release and enjoy her childhood for the last time.

Here is how the process begun:

Inspiration and research

For the first scene I was inspired by my own childhood views – deserted beaches and send dunes. The house is very small and old, inspired by houses we can still see around here, built at least 60 years ago. It's surrounded by a big neglected yard. I wanted her stuff to be everywhere – so toys were placed on the roof and in the yard, drawings, diaries and old letters were hung on the fence and on the laundry carousel.

Lili's childhood took place somewhere between the 70s-80s, so I had to make my research about this period. The way toys looked then, what were theymade of, what kind of cloths kids wear, what hair style they had. It was nice to go back to my own childhood, look into old albums and pick into old boxes. I also went to a lot of vintage stores and flea markets. And of course a lot of web wandering.