“Ukraine is wonderful!”
An 11th-grader created a patriotic plasticine cartoon
Ukraine, Your Country is the title of the cartoon created by Zaporizhia high school student Vadym Boldurat. One kilogram of plasticine and love for the country was all it took the lad to make this project.
“I was inspired by events happening in Ukraine,” Boldurat told us, “and they prompted me to make this cartoon. I decided to use the cartoon form to tell people that Ukraine is wonderful! It has a lot of potential, but we often do not understand this fact and do not know how to use its wealth. Every watcher of my video has to understand that the nation’s future depends on us. We build it by our actions.”
Ukraine, Your Country is Boldurat’s 15th cartoon. The lad has been sculpting from plasticine and clay since childhood; when younger, he collected animal figurines and played with them, wishing them to come to life. Boldurat realized his dream in the fifth grade when he began to create simple “cartoons” by sculpting figurines and creating videos of them with his phone.
“Frankly, these videos were primitive,” the high schooler said. “I took them with a phone which swayed mightily when recording them. I had neither Internet access nor any knowledge of animation at the time, so I just worked on them to the best of my ability. I spent two weeks at it during the fall break when I was in the fifth grade, did not like the results and quit that hobby. Two years ago, I remembered my childhood passion and tried again. I spent about two months searching for information on the Internet and read a lot of articles about making plasticine cartoons. Having undergone a thorough training, I went to work, making time-lapse shots of every move with a tripod-equipped camera. It was my first cartoon, telling the story of camels.”
The lad is his own scriptwriter and sculpts his cartoons’ characters with his own hands.
“It is quite easy to work with plasticine, one just has to allow it to soften. Walking characters still present a challenge for me, as I cannot get them moving well. For some reason, my figurines are not stable and fall all the time,” the animator said.
Friends and classmates like Boldurat’s cartoons. The lad himself really enjoys his work, especially when he sees a long-awaited result. Even so, Boldurat has decided to become a veterinarian, thus getting into a more serious profession, but he has no intention to part with his hobby so far.
