Project "Marfa": Introduction.

Onе early morning in last August, three cars started out from three different states, carrying 7 people, 4 swords, and 2 trunks full of costumes and props. This strange company arrived at the designated meeting place in Sleepy Hollow, NY, all 7 still fairly sleepy themselves, and proceeded to spend the day (the first of several), shooting a short opera music video.

This is the story of how and why it all happened and why I ended up being one of the seven sleepy travelers in Sleepy Hollow that day.


Earlier that year, our resident opera star in training, Zoya Gramagin, decided that it was time to let her (very beautiful) voice be heard by a wider public through a music video. Together with Vadim Baranovsky, a student of digital video production, they chose an aria that lent itself nicely to a narrative script: Marfa's Prophecy aria from Mussorgsky's "Khovanschina". Vadim wrote a script, bringing the setting from late XVII century Russia to a generic fantasy world, and then they both recruited me to conceptualize and create all the visuals for the video. Thus, quite unexpectedly for myself, I ended up a production designer for an otherworldly music video – with all the challenges and joys such an undertaking might bring. Having no budget to speak of was just a bonus.

With "Generic Fantasy" as my only brief, I had quite a lot of freedom, in theory. In practice, however, the non-existing budget was quite a limitation. I gathered from friends and family all the costumes and props I could lay my hands on. Thankfully, some of my friends are into LARP, and do have random articles of "medievalish"-looking clothing lying around the house. When I could not find what I needed, I made it from scratch using what materials I could find in the house – sometimes keeping all that junk around really comes in handy! I almost fulfilled the no-budget requirement. My only project-specific purchases were the prophecy basin, some metallic paint, glue, a cape for the male lead, some makeup and the hiring fee of a horse and riding double – friends and family flat out refused to believably impersonate a horse for me.

For about a month prior to the memorable morning in Sleepy Hollow, I was happily spending all my free time scouting locations, searching for props and costumes, matching, sewing, adding decorative pearl ornaments, coating wood with silver paint, collecting seashells, painting dirt onto a skull and talking to riding schools.

Over the next few posts in this series I will try to post more details about each aspect of the production: the sets, the costumes and the props.

The project is currently in post-production, so I hope that by the time I'm done with describing the creation process, I'll be able to show you some footage, too.