Jules meets ai Cinematographer, Sophia KORNIENKOコニンコ

I was introduced to Sophia, the creator, and genius behind this incredible AI documentary on Ukraine, via social media. Our mutual friend, Kris Kashtanova introduced us and said I might be interested in Sophia’s works and when I first watched her movie I knew I had to learn more about her and this creation. I have watched this movie a few times now and I’m amazed at how she put it all together and was inspired by her project.

Sophia says, “I have finally published the project I have been working on for many months! It’s an animated short based on an interview with a Ukrainian child who escaped the Russian bombing. This is a personal project on the intersection of journalism, ai research, and animation, as most assets have been made in collaboration with D-ID, Mid journey, 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.

This short film is only part one of a two-part series. I am currently working on part 2, which is going to be harsher, black and white, and based on Milana’s mother’s monologue.

Where did the inspiration come from?
I met Milana, the girl whose voice you hear in the film, in Belgium, where our family has lived for the past 6 years. I met her through another Ukrainian family whom we met in our street and who are still living in our apartment back in Antwerp. I recorded a long interview with Milana and her mom in mid-April 2022 in Ghent, Belgium.

It struck me how mature Milana sounded and the topics she wanted to talk about. Before we even started recording, while walking in the beautiful streets of Ghent, she told me how women were getting raped in the suburbs of Sumy and how they had a family friend who spoke out about this and had disappeared. Milana also told me she tried to talk to the
Russian kids on TikTok, to no avail.

I am very grateful that Milana and her mother agreed to sit down with me to talk about their experiences and have supported my idea to create an animated film based on their monologues. They are two very brave young women who survived the first several weeks of the Russian invasion, whose friends in the nearby occupied villages were harassed by the Russian invaders, but who haven’t shut down or become paralyzed with fear. They were very open and very much oriented toward the future.

That’s incredible, what is the concept behind your film?
The main concept behind my film is to show this contrast between 2022 as the year of tech breakthroughs, incredible leaps in ai, quantum physics, and cosmology, and at the same time the year of this anachronistic Russian aggression, taking us at least 80 years back in time, and partially even back into the Dark Ages.

I am amazed at the Ukrainian resilience and I believe in the children like Milana. I believe Ukraine will become a very technologically advanced society. Another reason why I made this film was to expose more people to what is going on in Ukraine today. The people who are interested in the new generative models and animation, but might not have been following Ukraine. Ukraine can only survive and win this war if the free world continues supporting it.

Milania and her Mom have traveled back to Sumy in early January and found their missing friend safe. That doesn’t change how worried they were about her at the time of the recording for the movie, many people missing have never returned.

You can find more of Sophia’s work here:
https://www.unschoolingfuture.net