Dream gives rise to talent: the Animagrad team took part in the charity project "Make a dream come true"

Veronika Timofeeva is 14 years old, she lives in the city of Smila, Cherkassy region, draws a lot and wants to become a professional animator. As in the girl's favorite cartoons, Veronica needs to pass a long way to fulfill the dream: she needs to collect a sufficient sum of money to purchase the expensive equipment, to find mentors capable of teaching the technology of animation and, finally, the most difficult part — to fight a rare disease that attacks her day after day, destroying the nervous system.

"She has seizures of unbearable headache; no medication can prevent it. So as just not to think about this pain, she paints. She sits down and paints landscapes, characters, just shades something — this is her personal meditation," Irina Markevych, a correspondent for the Television News Service, 1 + 1 channel says.

The main characters of the cartoons do not defeat all the "monsters" alone, in their adventures the team always helps them, and Veronica should not fight alone as well. Together, the authors of the 1 + 1's project “Make a dream come true” and “Novella Company” (Wacom's official distributor in Ukraine), Animagrad studio (FILM.UA Group) will help Veronika Timofeeva to fulfill her dream — to create her own cartoon.

On June 22, Veronica and her mother visited the Animagrad studio where met animators, directors, and artists. The complicated techniques of animation, for example, what an animatic and modeling are, why a storyboard is needed, and why animation is the most complex and expensive genre of the film industry, were introduced and explained to the girl. After a series of informative lectures, Veronica admitted that the lesson on scenario mastery and direction turned out to be the most useful for her.

"Over the past five years I've been watching cartoons and I'm surprised — how can all of this be done?! I want to learn more about this, I want to create my own cartoon, animated series, so that each series has its own unique story. I used to try making short films on one site, and so I got acquainted with the bases, with the technologies. So, I think that from a technical point of view it will not be very difficult for me to make a cartoon, the main thing is to come up with a story, one that will hook spectators up. I will deal with technology, I'm not afraid of anything." 

Over the next months, Veronica will learn remotely from the best animators of the studio how to draw her first cartoon. The plot is already there: in the distant future,on one of the planets of the solar system an unusual school will be opened, and itwill unite the most amazing creatures from all over the galaxy within its walls, but with one important condition — despite obvious differences in characters, ways of life and even physiology, people and inhabitants of other planets will live and learn "in peace and harmony".

All of this would have been impossible without the curators of the project “Make a dream come true”— Lydia Taran and Alexandra Loboda, the Krona charity foundation, and friends. Elena Borisova, the manager of the Dima Borisov Family Network, presented Veronika a powerful high-‘tech laptop, and representatives of Wacom Corporation presented the girl the IntuosComic graphic tablet, installed a package of necessary programs and showed how to work with them. 

"Adult users need from a few hours to several days to master the necessary skills to work with the tablet, and children from 20 to 30 minutes. I see that Veronica, even in this short period, learned how to work with the tablet quite professionally. I hope one day her dream will come true," — Andrei Barjolo, product manager of “Novella Company”, the official distributor of Wacom, says.

Corporate social responsibility for the creative company Animagrad means participation in a variety of educational projects, not only at the local level of the district and city, but also internationally, for example, with UNICEF. But the story of one person, of helping them is an equally important and valuable experience for the studio.

"For Animagrad, the opportunity to help Veronica and to take part in the project "Make a dream come true" is amazingly important and very much in tune with what we do every day, just coming to work: we embody the wildest fantasies, develop the Ukrainian industry, teach and learn the art of animation itself in order to make the lives of our viewers, both adult and young, brighter, more interesting, easier. We are glad to welcome Veronica to our team, we wish her good luck and will help to make her dream come true," Yegor Olesov, CEO of Animagrad, says.