SOVIET UNION INTERVIEW

ClassTypography 2
Motion Design 2

Dates
Nov-Dec 2025

A one-minute animation of an interview from my mom regarding her account of living in Ukraine during the Soviet Union.
Featuring photos from my family’s storage.

Outside of design, it’s given me so much perspective on why my parents immigrated to America and their lives growing up. I’m really glad I pursued this project, and it’s become a sort of love letter to my heritage.

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Going into this project, my initial inspiration was to work with Ukrainian type, the language I speak at home. This idea transformed into a merging of my Type 2 and Motion 2 finals; interviewing my family members about their experience of Ukraine during the Soviet era, aiming to educate a general audience on the matter. I would feature photos gathered from my family’s storage, aiming to not find any from the internet.

Because of the nature of this project, essentially being historical accounts, I had to do a lot of research at the beginning. Though my deliverable ended up being one interview with my mom that lasted a minute, I recorded multiple interviews with five different family members just to figure out what narrative I should focus on.

One of the biggest challenges of this project was that I couldn’t afford to make it longer than a minute; I wouldn’t have been able to get it done. There was so much content to be covered, so many stories I could tackle. Because of the heavy political context, I had to be delicate with how I handled the material. I didn’t aim to discuss an economic system in a vacuum; I wanted to convey my family’s unique interaction with it because they had multiple perspectives through different cultural experiences. I ended up working with my mom to create a solid script for her to read, which would tie into the photos and create a cohesive statement. It mainly focused on the levels of schooling, restrictions under the union, and propaganda.

There were many phases of ideation going into this project, and a lot of reworking my first concept. I wanted to convey a somewhat somber and mysterious tone in the animation. Having a varied, expanded/condensed sans serif font was an aspect that stayed consistent from the beginning, as I wanted to emulate how my mom’s perspective was warped under the union.

I had a back-and-forth struggle deciding how much of this project was going to be traditional. I had a lot of ideas including using the riso machine, doing traditional rotoscoping on translucent paper, recording a stop motion video interview, lasercutting a cyrllic stencil, and others that didn’t make the cut. I wanted to stay as authentic as possible, but I realized that it was unnecessary to do traditional if it doesn’t add to the narrative, and I can achieve the same effect digitally. I did some tests with the scanner bed that I used as a reference to further replicate that hand-done, scanned-in effect. I borrowed from the mechanics of rotoscoping, opting to export them in as gifs from procreate, and drawing each frame rather than using an effect in AE to make it seem like it’s hand-drawn animation. This technique merged authentic and digital production, conveying a layered message and approach.