Today, I am drinking the elixir from the source, thinking about giants and foxes in Wales, UK, and the magic and myth of this planet we call Earth.
This is because, when you are in post-production, it can be essential to stay connected to the golden shining thread of creative impulse, meaning inception of creative concept, that led to the project’s origin. This is because film production, including the editing that must take place in post, can be quite the tedious marathon.
My current WIP film is By Cadair Idris. A bilingual Welsh and English live-action and animated short, visual inspiration for the film was shot on Cader Idris in Meirionnydd in Snowdonia, Wales, UK, and animated in London by Tulip Animations. Playing the music in this Giphy is the magnificent Gemma Balaam playing The Queen’s March (Morfa’r Frenhines), Welsh folk harp music on the Gothic Erard harp.
Logline: A little girl can’t sleep, so her mother tells a story of a fox who entertains y Ddraig Goch (the red dragon) with a legend about what happens if someone summits on Cadair Idris overnight, Lord of Annwn’s (Welsh Otherworld) hunting ground.
There were multiple moments of inspiration for the bilingual Welsh and English Welsh myth-based short film By Cadair Idris (BCI). Having visited Snowdonia in Northern Wales previously, the magic of Cadair Idris was calling to my creativity and bardess self. A red fox ran past me in Singleton Park, in Swansea, Wales, one summer night in 2022; that same day, my London-based female animator saw and snapped a photo of a fox as well. I leapt into preproduction immediately. There is much archetypal energy emanating from mythical magical Wales herself; the mythic of Cymru gets in one’s blood, happily. Dylan Thomas wrote ‘By Cader Idris, tempest-torn’, an inspiring fragment of a poem recited by the character Reverend Eli Jenkins, in his world-renowned play, film, and radio drama ‘Under Milk Wood’. Ultimately, I wanted to again paint in film, and developing a short based on a Welsh myth found in the text ‘The Giants of Wales and Their Dwellings’, ca. 1600, Peniarth MS 118 f.829-837, by Siôn Dafydd Rhys, felt ideal.
