Iliya Pronin
ABOUT
Zhazhelo and I have created something incredibly beautiful. Can you imagine medieval tapestries? You know, the ones with knights, unicorns, and tons of flowers (a technique called millefleur). Now imagine this whole canvas suddenly coming to life. I wondered: what would the cartoon look like if every frame was actually hand-embroidered over the course of years? Clearly, human effort wouldn't be enough, but we harnessed our neural networks and forced them to produce that same "tube" and painstaking aesthetic of a carpet coming to life. What's inside this visual trip: * Pure medieval hardcore: — I took references from real manuscripts and "drolleries" (the drawings in the margins of medieval books aren't funny). So in the video, you'll find those very same meme-worthy frogs, fighting hares, dragons, and griffins straight from the 12th century. Historians and aesthetes will definitely get a kick out of it. * The plot is in the spirit of an epic. It's a story about a knight on a journey and the princess who awaits him in the castle and helps him, embroidering his fate, protecting him from misfortune (this is also a reference to the Norns, the spinners of fate from Scandinavian mythology). * The style is "maxed out." I mixed the harsh romanticism of Kipling with the melancholic vibe of the Pre-Raphaelites. The result is profound, historical, and incredibly beautiful. I must have listened to this track a thousand times while I was working on it. And you know what? The 1001st time, it hits me even harder. Zhazhelo's music is complex, multilayered, and I wanted to create a visual that doesn't just "flicker" in the background, but lives in the same league. In short, we've created something that won't go bad in a week, because it has soul and a ton of handcrafted (albeit digital) work. Come and see it - it's truly epic.