after the Khruschev Thaw era began. Initially, they thought of drawing inspiration by going to Copenhagen in Denmark, the land where Andersen wrote New Fairy Tales. First Volume. Second Collection (1844). However the route to Western Europe and the Danish lands was closed in the mid-1950s due to the iron curtain. As an alternative, they went to Riga, Tallinn and Tartu along the Baltic states. A stay of two weeks drawing the streets and corners of the towns provided the groundwork for production of the film. The city square in the film is modeled after the city of Tallinn. From the fall of 1955 to the early summer of 1956 storyboards were prepared. It took a year and a half to complete the film. In 1956, before the release of The Snow Queen, the artists released a series of postcards of the drawings related to this event. Character design The animators took a new approach to drawing the Snow Queen. They emphasized the spectral presence of the Snow Queen by using the animation technique known as rotoscoping or "éclair" named after the table manufacturer company of the same name. Éclair used an epidiascope that would be fixed on one side of a furniture equipment provided by furniture company Éclair and the screen projector was fixed on the other side. As one of the acclaimed actress of Soviet Union, Maria Babanova and a few other cast members was cinematographically filmed as if the actors are in live performance with makeup and costume. Then the film footage is transferred to celluloid with some corrections. The role of the Snow Queen would resemble the mannerisms and unique qualities of the actress as the film footage is translated into frame-by-frame drawings. Yanina Zhejmo, acclaimed actress of the Russian musical Cinderella (1947) got the role to play Gerda. According to Leonid Shvartsman work for The Snow Queen lasted two years. The animators researched at the Lenin Library. The studio would be filled with thousands of drawings every day that had to be checked and corrected. Shvartsman explains as one of the creators of the Snow Queen, she was supposed to represent cold beauty of the ice world - "In this case, there was no prototype. I imagined a majestic, cold beauty." The character was modeled as if sculpted by stone. Additionally, Maria Babanova's voice became a fitting addition to the character the Snow Queen. The