Wawel Dragon
‘Wawel Dragon’ is my first adaptation of a classic Polish folktale famous in Eastern Europe. The folktale has many versions, although the most popularly told is the underdog story about Skuba, the Shoemaker with no high social status or brute strength, who uses his clever mind to defeat the dragon by lacing a fake sheep with sulphur. It is a tale with historical and cultural significance to my people. I am half-Polish. Ever since the pandemic, I wanted to share positivity in the sense of going back to the old and refreshing it to a broad audience, including English-speaking countries that have never heard of this story.
I always wanted to make an epic stop motion for my graduation film, and I felt that Wawel Dragon was the best way to express my fondness for the scope and genre. As the director and animator, I tasked myself to research the story, the locations, figure out the character designs, how the story could be told using stop motion, what the sound is going to be, how many locations will need to be built. Because of the pandemic and the studios kept closing down, only to be left open with a tight deadline, I decided to build a DIY studio in my bedroom in preparation for university closing during the lockdown.
