Nora Snyder Animation
Bog Queen
An upcoming project
“Bog Queen” will be a surreal romantic stop motion short film about Dr.Marcia Dahl, an archaeologist who studies ancient bog bodies. The story follows Marcia as she develops an obsessive, mystical, and romantic relationship with the bog-preserved corpse of an ancient queen she is studying, who was killed in ritual sacrifice in the Iron Age.
Bog bodies refer to corpses preserved by a process of natural mummification that occurs when human remains are buried in peat bogs. Due to the specific chemical conditions in these bogs, human bodies can be preserved unbelievably well, sometimes even for thousands of years. The forensic study of these bodies reveals compelling details of how certain ancient people may have lived and died. I have found learning about these bodies and discovering their stories through the clues in their remains to be fascinating, mysterious, and extraordinarily profound. Looking into the real faces of people who lived and died thousands of years ago makes time seem to collapse in on itself. It makes me realize that although the decaying bodies in which we reside are insignificant in the face of eternity, our lives are part of something continuous— that the collective human spirit transcends time, and death, and pain.
The film I want to make, “Bog Queen” will reflect this realization— and my fascination with bog bodies— in a narrative told with stop motion puppets.
The use of puppets feels central to the communication of this project’s themes. Stop motion puppets are inherently inanimate objects— their meaning comes not from the stuff their bodies are made of, but from the life we give them when we put them in front of a camera. Though their little lives end when we stop photographing them, their stories remain immortalized in the film, which parallels how bog bodies— and the clues to the lives that came before— become immortalized in the earth. Like puppets, human bodies are inherently inanimate objects that are briefly haunted by animation, but neither of our lives lose meaning after we stop moving. This is the underlying concept of my film.
images ©Nora Snyder 2024
Synopsis
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“Bog Queen” is a stop motion animated short film that tells the story of an archaeologist named Marcia Dahl studying ancient bodies discovered in bogs, who begins to have a mystic connection with a corpse she is studying: that of an Iron Age queen who was killed in ritual sacrifice. As Marcia uncovers details about this queen’s life and death, she begins to experience an altered reality in which she sees inside the mind of the ancient woman on the day of her death. Marcia feels such a strong connection with the queen, in part because she is also facing her own mortality— Marcia has an unidentified illness that is causing her body to decay. As she begins to resemble the bog bodies she studies, Marcia turns to the queen for insight. Her connection to the queen grows stronger and becomes less and less grounded in reality, so much so that in the end, Marcia returns to the bog, to be with her queen and to rejoin in the eternal cycles of life and death. This film explores death and eternity from an archaeological standpoint— how although our bodies don't last, our significance on earth does not end with death, because humanity and the forces of love continue eternally.