Animated Diaries of War: SUMY
Animated short film based on an authentic interview with a Ukrainian child who escaped Russian shelling.
mp4, 00:04:39:00, 1920 x 1080, 29,97 fps, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Fresco, Stable Diffusion, D-ID, Midjourney, Deforum
This is personal project on the intersection of journalism, ai research and animation, as most assets have been made in collaboration with D-ID, Midjourney and other image generating models, often via feeding raw monologues by the child (with some stylistic constraints) into the prompts.
It's a continuous shock for me to be collaborating with amazing state of the art image generating models while my contemporaries in Ukraine, including digital creators like myself, are being subjected to anachronistic, benighted attacks and torture. One of the reasons I've chosen to collaborate with ai for this project is because I wanted to emphasize this juxtaposition between civilization and crude obscurantism. I believe it’s not only a war between freedom and slavery, but also between breakthrough technology and rigid obsoleteness.
I devote this film to Milana Ostapenko, a brave 11 year old girl who survived the first weeks of the war in her native city of Sumy in northeastern Ukraine. We recorded this interview in Belgium in April 2022. As I’m writing this in December 2022, the Sumy region is still being shelled.
I also devote this film to all Ukrainian children and teenagers. The future is theirs.
