More than 50 animators from 19 countries contributed
16 September 2020, 17:43 | Dzianys Martynovich, TUT.BY
The work of Yulia Ruditskaya has been seen by most self-respecting Belarusians – she is the director and artist of the famous animated film “Let’s be Belarusians!”, in which the history of our country was told in five minutes. Now, Yulia lives in the USA and continues to engage in animation. The video above is her new project, “Animators For Belarus”.
According to Ruditskaya, both she and her colleagues around the world are worried about the events in Belarus. So, she came up with an idea to create a collaborative project and express support for Belarusians in the language of animation.
Yulia wrote about the project on her Facebook page, posted ads in professional groups of animators on social networks, and wrote to some friends personally.
“More than 50 animators from 19 countries on four continents (Eurasia, North America, Africa, and Australia) responded. Everyone worked on a voluntary basis, listening to their heart and soul. The youngest animator who took part in the project is only 12 years old.”
According to Yulia, many of her colleagues knew in detail about the events in Belarus; some of them knew less, some in general terms, but everyone empathized deeply with the Belarusian people.
“I proposed a general concept. We took the historical flag of independent Belarus as a compositional basis. It has a red stripe in the middle and two white stripes along the edges. This is a unifying structure that allowed for transitions and combining scenes from different artists with each other into a single work. Animators themselves could interpret these colors as they pleased, both in the context of modern Belarusian events and as something abstract. I didn’t impose anything on anyone. But it seems to me that all the animators very accurately felt what was happening in Belarus. Therefore, all the scenes turned out to be very expressive and absolutely in context.”
The work took less than a month. Everyone worked in unison. According to Ruditskaya, each animator worked in their own technique.
“There was 3D animation, classic drawing on paper, animation transfer, painting on glass, plasticine doll animation, stop-motion with origami, fruits, animation with a needle on film, and a very interesting pixelation technique combined with body art. Animators had complete creative freedom. And perhaps due to this, an interesting result was obtained.”
Yulia herself acted as one of the animators, and also combined the fragments together into an integrated animation.
“It was interesting for me to observe how there are common themes, how people from different countries choose consonant moments and intonations, metaphors. This helped to unite things that seemed completely eclectic at first glance. Therefore, the film turned out to be a whole work.”
What is the story of the film?
“This film is not only about the white-red-white flag, it is also a story about all of us. We go through these difficult, dramatic moments in history. We are reborn and moving forward.”
