First ideas for transcription project

Since at the moment I'm unable to do work with maya, I decided to do some research for the next project and finish undone movie reviews. For the incoming project I want to do something very closely connected to Baltic Pagan culture. I was inspired to do something like that when I saw "Secret of Kells".This theme helps me to understand what kind of style, textures and time I should look at. There are many classic examples of that kind of interpretations. One of the most popular interpretations was Lithuanian musical called "Devil's Bride" (Velnio nuotaka) (1973) directed by Arūnas Zebriūnas. It was a modern transcription of Kazys Boruta's tale "Whitehorn mill" ("Baltaragio malūnas").

This movie brought everything from the time of the story when it was written, traditional folk imagery and clothing and spiced it up with the 70's feeling.

There is another famous folk tale called "Queen of Serpents" (Eglė žalčių karalienė).  A very sad story which was show as a short screening directed by Algirdas Selenis and Aurika Seleniene.

This short video have really nice native style of drawing, but the chosen story is simply too long to tell clearly in few minutes. For a person who is unfamiliar with this story this animation wouldn't make much sense, but without style of drawing there is another good thing - the soundtrack. The soundtrack was created by Kūlgrinda. Kūlgrinda is a neofolk/pagan band from Vilnius, Lithuania. The word "Kūlgrinda" means a secret underwater causeway from the Baltic history.

At the moment I had two ideas of what I could do:

1) From various Baltic pagan folk tales I want to create a character of the Velnias (devil). In pagan culture devil is not a satan or demon - devil is a spirit. It has a lot to show and it is very different character from what we understand and know about it from Catholic religion. It is nether good or evil, but it is twisted as hell. Pagan devil is more connected to nature, he has his trees and animals. Depending from the situation devil is punishing evil, greedy or ignorant people or helps to those who really need it. His worst enemy and the one who is scaring him the most is thunder. In Catholic religion Devils are usually sinned angels, but in Pagan culture he is just a spirit of nature, who might do sins or whatever he actually wants. It is a very charizmatic spirit that often doesn't get along well with people, he is more like a rival to them and maybe that is the reason why when Christianity came he was aligned with satan, but there is still a big difference between them.

2) Interpretations of lyrics from a Kūlgrinda's song called "Užtekėja saulala raudona" (Red sun has risen).

This song is talking about a very common folk theme - while the red sun is rising young man is coming back from war and he brings back gifts for a girl. He is bringing her scarf of silk, golden ring as well as a crown of rue which simbolically means that he will take her and her virginity for that. It is easy to adapt iconic baltic symbols and textures for this song and the video could be really visually interesting.