Visual series for the exhibition "Alexander Nevsky. The Fate of Russia"

The year 2021 is the 800th anniversary of the birth of Grand Duke Alexander Nevsky. Our team is working together with several agencies to create multimedia interactive exhibition “Alexander Nevsky. The Fate of Russia”. We participate in the development of the concept, conduct historical research, create a narrative of history At that time we did not know how large-scale this project would be.

Initially, the exhibition was supposed to be made only in the historical park “Russia – my history|Ekaterinburg”, but the concept attracted the attention of other branches of the museum. Subsequently, the exhibition was shown in all 23 historical parks of the country.

The peculiarity of the exhibition was the visual narrative. We will talk about it in this article.

Concept development

The area of the exposition space is 800 square meters. Based on the theme of the exposition, the key events were highlighted and placed in interactive zones. The main narrative was left on projection screens.
And then the main question arose: what will be on the screens? How will we tell the story of the most famous prince in Russia?

While we were thinking about it, in parallel we were looking for visual images of Nevsky. There are no photographs from the period, and there are so few written sources that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. And we also need to strike a balance between historical accuracy and fiction. Eisenstein’s 1938 movie, paintings by Roerich, Serov, Korin, Semiradsky and other artists, and iconography are publicly available.

We had to unify the interactive areas into a single thread through the narrative on the screens. It could have been a text and an illustration. But that seemed like a boring idea to us. A silent picture and text was not what we were aiming for. We needed a living character with a story. In our case, we already had a hero, so we decided to illustrate the story we were working with – the life story of Alexander Yaroslavich.
We made a comic book!

Historical research

When creating an exhibition, pre-project research is always carried out in order to find and accumulate the necessary material for the work. Therefore, we included in this stage the historical research that we needed to create illustrations. Historians and archaeologists of the team studied the life of Ancient Russia of the XIII century, household utensils, architectural appearance of cities and houses in particular, elements of clothing.

We began immersion in Alexander Nevskiy’s epoch with sources. We used mainly the work of historian Alexei Karpov, who collected in his work all written monuments relating to Alexander Yaroslavich, from the Novgorod Chronicles to the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle and the works of Polish historian of the XVI century R. Heydenstein. But other historians were also consulted.

Let us understand by examples.
1. In the first act we see how the brothers-princes sit at the table and learn to write. The children are writing on ceras. What it is and how it looked like was found in the article by E.A. Rybina “Ceres from excavations in Novgorod. Novgorod and Novgorod Land. History and Archaeology”, 1995.

Ceres were rectangular plates (sometimes with a rounded top) made of wood, less often of bone, with a carved interior, which was filled with wax of black or some other color. In order for the wax to stick more firmly to the surface of the wood, the inner space was covered with notches. During all the years of excavations in Novgorod from 1932 to 1994, only 11 such tablets for writing on wax were found.

2. Novgorod citadel and St. Sophia Cathedral. What the Kremlin looked like, how the walls, roofs and courtyard looked like. Here we were greatly helped by A.N. Kirpichikov’s book “Stone Fortresses of the Novgorod Land”, from which we learned the peculiarities of the structure of different fortresses. In Veliky Novgorod of the XIII century the St. Sophia Cathedral was stone, and the mansion and other buildings were wooden.

Art Department

In parallel with the group of historians, the art department began work. The director, together with a storyboard artist, broke down the script into frames. This process is similar to working on a movie: the director determined how the frame should look like, for this purpose imagining where the invisible camera is installed. This is how the dramaturgy of the narrative was built. General plans and detailed plans, close-ups, medium shots, perspective from above or below, frame composition – all this influenced the viewer’s perception of the picture.

The storyboard went to the artist, who made the illustration in black and white. Then the line was given to the colorist – he made the picture in color.

Almost all the shots were “animated” with the help of animation. Rain was dripping somewhere, snow was falling somewhere, arrows were flying in the battle scenes, swords were slicing through the air. In this way, the comic book filled the exhibition space with movement. Particular highlights were shown with the help of a video, also created with frames from the comic book.

Сomplete product

That’s how we collected a picture of XIII century Rus by bits and pieces. We got an independent work – a comic book, which later took the form of a book. As part of the exposition in Yekaterinburg, the illustrations were supplemented with attractions – interactive zones. In other parks of “Russia – My History” the comic exhibition was presented separately.

“We told a distinctive artistic story of Prince Alexander Nevsky, very personal, but inextricably linked to the era. The story of a son, father, husband, ruler, warrior and diplomat,” – director and author of the comic book Lev Mavrin.