Living in ivy viLLaCreated by Nelli Sipilä

SynopSiS

At the end of a street next to a wild spruce forest stands an old wrecked brick house named “Ivy Villa”. In this house lives a snappy little skeleton girl named Paulina, who many children would consider a lucky lass because she is living on her own without bossy adults. However as fun as it is to live on your own, keeping the household in order is anything but easy. It’s not enough that the house itself falls apart before your eyes, but the monsters and other creatures from the nearby forest make simple errands like gardening and washing dishes hard tasks because of their constant (unwanted) visits. It doesn’t help either that cocky and serious adults from neighbourhood come in and loudly underestimate Paulina’s ability to take care of her household.

When all these things collapse with Paulina’s angry and impatience nature an ultimate chaos has been summoned. Every daily task is always a new adventure and a fight between her and the world, where the prize is to get chores done without losing her mind for good. Fortunately she has friends who help her when she’s in trouble and remind her to also enjoy her childhood even though she has taken the role of being the responsible house owner. Balancing between adulthood and childhood is a though call, but Paulina is not a kind of person to avoid challenges no matter how frustrating it is. That’s just how things go when you’re living on your own in such place like Ivy Villa.

Format and ruLeS

The series is adventurous comedy animation with horror themes like gothic backgrounds and scary looking monsters, and it’s made for children age 7 to 11 years old. It has eleven minutes long episodes with stretch-and-squash 2D-animation made in Toon Boom Studio. The animation has pen line art style like in old newspaper comics and gothic illustrations. The colouring is in grey scale except Paulina’s dress and her occasional furious eyes that are coloured red to show her fractious nature.

The series is based on visual humour, not on funny dialogue. None of the characters speak besides grunting, laughing and so on. They communicate with their gestures, facial expressions and occasional noises like in old cartoons from 1920s. The main theme of the series is growing up and balancing between childhood and adulthood, which is shown by making Paulina, the protagonist, do normal daily tasks and facing the (exaggerated) problems where her patience and unselfishness is being tested. The struggle of living on your own is shown in comedic way, but it still has the subtle feel of hopelessness to make it believable.

CharaCter deSCriptionS

PAULINA

Paulina is a little skeleton girl, who’s the proud owner of the Ivy Villa

house and series’ protagonist. She’s brave and fair little girl with sense of responsibility, but she’s also terribly

impatient and hot-headed which lead her to troubles all the time. She loves music and adventure

stories, but she’s also interested in things that grown ups do like baking

and house holding.

Main cast

JUDE

Jude lives in the attic of Ivy Villa and is like a little brother to Paulina even though he’s a bat. He’s naive

and fearful little creature who gets bullied a lot because he’s not brave enough to fight back. He

loves everything that tastes sweet (especially strawberry jam) and

trekking in the forest, even though its full of monsters he’s afraid of.

LUPITA

Lupita is a faulty cursed doll created by Paulina and she has a big heart, but no brains. She’s

empathic little doll who befriends with anybody and is too dumb to be afraid of anything, which makes her vulnerable to mean monsters. She loves plants and bugs, which is why she constantly brings them inside

the house (against Paulina’s will, of course).

TERRY

Terry is a sly freeloader cat, who moved in to the house without any permission and has lived

there ever since. He rarely cares about anybody else than himself and always has a sly smile on his

face that makes him even less trustworthy than he already is. He loves taking naps on warm spots

and playing tricks on other people.

CHARLIE

Charlie is Paulina’s pet fish and does everything fishes usually do: eat, swim and stare. He’s not very active except when Paulina is kind enough to take him for a walk to

the sea where he becomes the most energised fish there ever is. He

loves food and large puddles where you can make big splashes when

you’re jumping.

Side characters

MEAN GARDEN GNOMES

Garden gnomes are old cranky people who live in Paulina’s garden and occasionally steal pencils, socks and other little

things from the house. They hate intruders and chase anyone who come near to their territory. Fortunately they’re not

bright creatures, which makes tricking them easy.

GHOST BROTHERS MOE AND LOU

Moe and Lou are ghost brothers who play pranks on Paulina and her friends often. They live in the nearby forest and usually come to haunt the Ivy Villa when they get bored.

They may look and act like scary ghosts, but on the inside they’re just little brats who seek for attention and don’t know

how to play nice.

MONSTERS

Most of the monsters are scary looking but harmless and shy creatures who rarely do bad things intentionally. Some of them (usually the smallest ones) live inside the house, but mostly they live in the

forest. They don’t like loud noises or direct sunlight, which is why they usually hide for daytime.

BUGS

Bugs live inside the house, in the garden and in the forest. They are mostly the eyewitnesses of Paulina’s and her

friends’ adventures, but sometimes they help them if they need assistance. Lupita and Jude are good friends with them,

because little creatures got to stick together, right?

ADULTS

Adults are giants who come and ruin all the fun little creatures have by scolding and being too serious about everything. They think they know what’s best for children and force

them to act like they do. So far Paulina is the only one who’s brave enough to stand against them, but even she feel uneasy

around adults.

exampLeS oF the epiSodeS

3.

Paulina is having a baking day and she makes a dough for devil’s cake. However she grows tired of waiting the cake to be done and makes the oven way too hot so it would bake the cake quicker. The oven blows up and the cake has turn into a little flaming imp who can set thing on fire. The imp starts to play with his new abilities making Paulina scared and angry. She starts to chase him with fire extinguisher and when she finally gets him cornered she doesn’t have a heart to put out now frightened and pleading imp. She puts the fire extinguisher down and makes up with the little imp. Later they both are roasting marshmallows on imp’s fire as the sign of reconciliation.

4.

Paulina takes her pet fish Charlie to the beach and lets him swim in the ocean while being on leash, but Charlie gets unleashed and swims after a little crab like a dog after a squirrel. Realising what happened Paulina ties two heavy bricks under her feet and walks underwater looking for her pet (she doesn’t need to breath underwater because she’s a skeleton). Finally she finds Charlie who is being chased by a huge pike. Paulina beats up the pike, scolds Charlie for running away and they both return to the beach.

1.

Paulina is having a cleaning day, but unfortunately the ghost brothers Lou and Moe are on their trickster moods and start to fooling around. They haunt all the cleaning tools Paulina tries to use and make the house even messier. Eventually Paulina gets mad and fights against the ghosts in old adventure film fight style, which ends up her sucking the brothers into a vacuum cleaner. For their punishment Lou and Moe are forced to clean up their messes while Paulina is guarding them.

2.

Paulina gets an angry letter from her neighbours who demand her to mow her yard. She asks her gang to come and help her with mowing, but the yard has become so wild the operation gardening turns into jungle exhibition. After hours of trekking they finally reach the shed where the lawnmower is and get attacked by garden gnomes. The gang escapes from the gnomes and leave the garden untouched. Couple days later Paulina gets another letter about her yard, but she tosses it to bin and calmly walks back to house through garden that has now literally turn into a jungle.

5.

Paulina, Jude and Lupita go to the spruce forest to collect mushrooms, where Jude trespasses the area that belongs to monster named Rhinocorn. The monster doesn’t like intruders and attacks Jude who runs back to Paulina and Lupita. The monster chases all of them around the forest until they finally manage to climb up onto high boulder out of Rhinocorn’s reach. Hours pass and the monster is still waiting them to climb back to the ground. Lupita thinks Rhinocorn must be hungry after all these hours and throws one of her mushrooms to the monster. The mushroom makes the monster dizzy and it falls asleep. The trio escapes and returns home safe and sound.

ConCept art

ContaCt detaiLS

NELLI SIPILÄ

EMAIL: nelli.sipila@hotmail.comMOBILE: +358 505748620LINKEDIN: fi.linkedin.com/pub/nelli-sipilä

ALSO VISIT MY WEBSITE:www.nellisipila.wix.com/studio-ink-frame

All characters, artwork © Nelli Sipilä 2015All Rights Reserved

Nelli Sipilä was born in 1989 in Helsinki, Finland, and one of her childhood dreams was to become a cartoonist. She graduated as Visual Artist from Alfa-Art School of Arts in 2011 and after that studied creating comics and illustrations in Kymenlaakso’s Institute for a year. During her studies in Kymenlaakso she got interested in animation and moved to UK to study it for three years in University of Worcester. She is specialised in 2D character animation and character designing. She loves drawing,

watching films and cartoons, and reading comics.