Making 'The Visit' - Sketches

This was the first sketch I made of the main character. I'd been looking at short stories for several hours and had stumbled across a rather poorly written tale from the Ukraine about a girl who meets a cow's head in the middle of the night. Strange. The story was on the internet somewhere and its retelling was clumsy and did not seem to get directly to the heart of what the story was about.

But a filmmaker of any kind at all must react powerfully to something or there simply isn't any reason to make a movie. The bare facts of this little story struck me as somehow expressing almost everything that's great and mysterious about fairy tales with very limited means. So I pulled out a yellow pad and a dull pencil and I sketched Oksana. There she is. Actually, she's pretty close to the more finished image in my prior post. These few images are all that I've done on this movie so far. There's plenty of work to do.