Porcelain War

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with writer/director/editor, Brendan Bellomo of the Oscar-nominated documentary, Porcelain War. It won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary. It won the PGA Award for Producing, won the Australian Screen Sound Guild Award and the HPA Award for Best Sound, and won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize award.

The film was nominated for an ASC Award for cinematography for its cinematographer, even though it was his first time using a camera. Bellomo edited the film with Kelly Cameron and his wife and producer, Aniela Sidorska.

Brendan, thank you so much for joining us on Art of the Cut. I loved this documentary. It’s gorgeous and it was truly affecting. I will be thinking about this for a long time.

Thank you so much for having me here. I appreciate those kind words.

This is a documentary about artists living in the middle of the Ukraine war. You knew about their art before the war happened, correct?

That’s right. One of our producers - my artistic partner and wife - Aniela Sidorska, grew up under Russian oppression in communist Poland, and she actually discovered Anya and Slava’s figurines about eight years ago.

She was truly moved by them because they reminded her of home. She shared them with me, and I was absolutely blown away! I just couldn’t believe that something so tiny had these enormous stories on its surface and the four of us actually began working on some animation. 

Then Russia invaded and I called up Slava to see if he was okay and to ask when they were leaving. He said, “No. We’re gonna stay. We’re going to keep making our art at night.” I said, “Why? What are you doing during the day?”

And he told me for the very first time, “I’m in the Ukrainian Special Forces, and I’m teaching everyday people - peaceful people - to fight back.”

And I thought, “This is unbelievable. There are these dual - totally unexpected - forms of resistance. One of them is these civilian soldiers, and the other - the last thing you think of people doing in a war zone - is being creative. So we really wanted to help them tell their story.

Slava or Andrey mentions in the film that they’ve never been photographers, so you must have provided them with gear and some training.

That’s right. It was an enormous challenge at the very beginning. We had everything working against us. We were separated by 6,000 miles. We didn’t speak the same language. We could communicate only over Zoom with an interpreter.

We’re in different time zones, different countries. They’re in a war zone and we didn’t know how to get a camera there. There was no infrastructure. I’d never made a documentary. My background all comes from narratives, but I had a camera and I packed it up in a box.

We were so lucky that we discovered this incredible network of volunteers. It was actually a makeup artist from New Jersey who was stockpiling medical supplies at her apartment – 50, 60 duffel bags at a time - and she’d bring them to the airport in a truck and fly them into Poland, drive them into Ukraine, and she said, “I’ll bring the camera to Slava.”

It was this incredible realization that everyday people were such an impactful part of trying to help their community in Ukraine. It’s not what you expect. This war is genocidal in essence. They are attacking the culture of Ukraine. When they first invaded, they bombed universities, museums - many artists were killed.

It’s the goal of authoritarian governments to destroy and erase the uniqueness of people. It’s not just about land, it’s not just about territory. Slava and Anya were replacing what was lost by having this declaration, “We’re going to stay. We’re going to make new art.

Co-Director Brendan Bellomo in Los Angeles shares how to use a camera with Co-Director Slava Leontyev and oil painter-turned-cinematographer Andrey Stefanov in Kharkiv, Ukraine, with Interpreter Kateryna Lapina. 

So the cameras arrived and we had the next enormous challenge. As you mentioned, they’d never used a camera before, but they were master visual artists. Slava, is a sculptor. Anya is a painter.

I asked Slava if he knew anyone who could just point the camera at them and press record. He said, “I’ll send you something. I have an idea.” He sends me this folder of photos of oil paintings – each one a masterwork in landscape art - emotional works. These paintings were cinematic. I said, “This is a cinematographer! He’s just not a camera operator.”

So we began to work together on Zoom every day. We established what I’d call an impromptu film school. I actually used to teach at NYU at Tisch. We had to teach them how to turn on the camera.

The first thing that might come into your head is this technical process: exposure, focus. How do you do this? How do you do that? But cinema is a language. It’s about the grammar. It’s about the intent.

So we talked about the meaning of close-ups, wide shots, coverage patterns, 180 degree rules, ideas for roaming cameras, and, two to one combinations from close to wide, and what different lens choice would mean emotionally.

This beautiful miracle happened. I really wanted to support them. I was planning on going in with a crew. We were gonna fly there with the boom operator, camera operator, everything. We’d sent them one camera, and the footage that they sent back was so intimate, so personal, and deeply visually beautiful.

From the very beginning it was so powerful that we said, “We can’t disturb this.” If you go into someone’s home with a camera crew, that’s a different dynamic. If I’m there with a boom operator that’s changing that conversation.

There’s a camera, a tripod. They have a small dog. They’re gonna be looking at the camera. They’re not going to be in their own world. So we said, “This could be the ultimate opportunity for what would be maybe one of the purest forms of verite you could have.” You have people telling their own story.

No crew. But they’re visual storytellers, they’re artists.

So we decided to work in deep collaboration, but from a distance. So we began this process as co-directors, Slava and I and talked like you and I are right now over Zoom. I’d say something, then I’m waiting for five minutes for translation.

Slava says something, then wait maybe five minutes. You can’t just interrupt each other: it’s these blocks. We’d get so frustrated, we started to sketch. These little sketches grew and they became a series of storyboards and blocking diagrams and ideas for lighting and shots.

We looked at photographs of paintings that we loved, and films that we loved, and we realized we were fluent in visual art. This universal language enabled a very rich, super-immediate collaboration.

Andrey knew where to put his canvas. That’s where you place the camera. What they captured became the film.

Porcelain War team meeting for the first at the airport in Salt Lake City, Utah. L→R: Slava Leontyev (Co-Director, Participant), "Frodo", Anya Stasenko (Participant), Brendan Bellomo (Co-Director), Olena Herasymenko (Participant), Paula DuPré Pesmen (Producer), Sonya Stefanova (Participant), Aniela Sidorska (Producer), Andrey Stefanov (Cinematographer, Participant), Anya Stefanova (Participant)

I always like talking about the beginning of a documentary. It means so much, those opening images, the opening montage. Talk about the nature, that it starts with.

They had started to film. They sent back these absolutely stunning shots: a leaf with sunlight of a little bug silhouetted inside of it, birds flying through dust and trees in the wind, and it was just stunning.

At the time there was a person on the project saying, “This isn’t a nature documentary. What are we filming? They’re in a war zone.” And I’m thinking, “They’re in a war zone and they’re choosing to film a leaf. They don’t know what b roll is.

They have no concept of a cutaway, so if they’re choosing to film something, it must have deep importance to them. I realized: this is not an escape. They’re not playing around with the camera. This is what they’re fighting for. This is what inspires them.

They’re connected. it’s like an extension of their family - the nature around Kharkiv. So we realized this is critical. This is what’s blossoming inside of their art. So we said, “We must begin with what they love.”

My background is narrative, even if I’m working in nonfiction, that’s gonna influence it no matter what. You try to think about “things as normal.” They had a beautiful life before Russia invaded Crimea in 2014.

It was peaceful. It’s fantastic. So we wanted to establish the basis of their love, of their artistic inspiration, of their relationship with their country, how relatable this place is.

Everything was there. There was almost no direct conversation about this because the visual storytelling was so unbelievably clear: “This is where we begin. This is where we begin the cut.”

We’ve received the question before: “In the edit, you smash cut to destruction at the beginning of the invasion in 2022. Was this an intentional choice? Are you trying to create contrast?” I don’t really think that way. It’s not about imposing a structure.

What they filmed from camera roll one to camera roll two shifted into a terror: loss and destruction. Then they would go into their workshop and they would making something new. So their lives, their choices was almost emotional whiplash!

Slava, as a soldier by day, but he’s making these beautiful, tiny, very fragile creations at night. So we just followed their lives. That’s what dictated the structure of the cut in a sense.

Tell me a little bit about the sound effects. There is that beautiful sense that the sound brings the images - which are already beautiful – alive.

I appreciate that question a lot. In many parts of the film, the sound came first. My father taught recording engineering, so I grew up cutting 2 inch, 24 track. I can punch in on a deck.

Aniela and I were cutting the film together. She had this idea about a countdown, this kind of ticking clock concept, and I instantly heard the rhythm, and I tapped this whole thing out. I did a meter map.

I cut in Avid, but I have ProTools open the whole time, so I just toggle between them. That scene started in black. And we mapped out all the sound, did a whole scratch sound design track.

I sent Slava a lot of audio recording equipment, and I said, “This is going to be even more foreign,” because they’ve never done anything with sound. At least with the camera, they understand composition, they understand light.

He’s taking audio recorders to the shooting range, he’s blowing them up with these huge pressure waves from assault rifles, and it’s shorting them out! So a lot of stuff got busted, but when he got the hang of it, he understood that the sound of a warzone is even more transportative than the images.

With the images, you become anesthetized, so he created an entire library of the echoes of shelling, air raid sirens, crickets, water, everything. So the soundscape of the film is all his recordings. Hundreds of hours of separate audio on all these recorders.

That became this basis over which to really establish this emotion. You can almost feel what the image is going to be. For me, if a scene is working with the picture off, then we’re really going to have something that could be strong.

Something similar happened with the score. It was a very unusual process. Coming from narrative, I worked on temp with our music editor, with whom I’ve worked on many narrative projects - Tim Starnes - who did Hugo, The Lord of the Rings, he’s unbelievable. 

Tim ended up getting involved a lot later than usual. We didn’t do an original score. We had something else happen. I was talking with Slava at the very beginning, and I asked, “Is there music that you love?” and he said, “I’m going to play something for you.

This is what Andrei listens to while he paints and played for me “Vesna,” the song that ended up opening the film and it was like stepping through a portal into Ukraine. It was absolutely unique, totally singular.

The band is making these vocalizations of birds and animal sounds. It’s very parallel to their art, and I was blown away. It sounded completely unique, but at the same time, it was universal. It was really moving.

I decided to start experimenting with it. I cut one scene then another with it, and all of a sudden the full first assembly of the film is to one band, which is the ultimate no-no, because this is not licensed, and it’s influencing the whole structure, the feeling, the rhythm of the cut, everything. I wasn’t temping. I was cutting to the music from day one.

So I went to Anya and our director and our other amazing producer, Paula DuPré Pesmen, who did The Cove. She’s a documentary veteran, so she was really guiding us. They said, “This is working. We’ve got to get in touch with the band.” And they couldn’t reach them.

They were trying to email them. They tried to call them on the phone. They’re trying to get to their website or Instagram, but were hitting a dead end. They realized the band is on tour. They’re constantly playing music around the world. They donate the proceeds of their music to musicians who are fighting.

We finally reached them and they were so moved by what Slava and I were doing, they said, “Please take our entire library” - unreleased music, all the stems, all the mixes - it was unreal. So that became this beautiful foundation. It gave it an authenticity and it had this full emotional range.

It wasn’t a band that’s operating in one emotional space - a rhythmic space. They’re very eclectic with their sentiment. They had this lamentation. They had things with a lot of movement, very reflective, very joyous. That was just a gift.

That’s the band that’s visually at the end, over the credits?

That’s right. We were really lucky to meet this documentary filmmaker who had been traveling with the band and filming all of these different concerts of theirs.

We thought, “What a tremendous way to show their musicianship - to honor that - to not leave the world, but to have something over the credits where you don’t just go to black because there’s such an immersion in their culture, and then to be able to have this spotlight come up and you begin to see them with the sound and understand they’re making these bird sounds.” It was very natural.

Aniela had this great idea. I started looking at the footage and there was no coverage. It was beautiful. It was stunning, but it was all comprised of these short little moments: a little shot of the accordion here, a shot of vocals.

It was two cameras filming some of the time across six years of the same song, different tempos, different acoustics, different outfits, different lighting. So I thought that there wasn’t enough coverage. It’s Christmas Day.

We’re trying to cut this to get it ready for Sundance. Aniela has this idea: “What if the spotlight is coming up and down, and we use black as the space?” I thought, “That’s fantastic! We’re just gonna fill that in with our imagination, so we mapped it all out.

We had to custom time-warp every single shot, so that all of the bow movements were on time with the track. It was really tough.

There are these transitions from the beauty of what they’d lost to these horrible scenes of war. How do you make those transitions in the story and in tone?

This was in essence a challenge, but it was a challenge that I think because we had a lot of openness and we were really communicative -Slava, Andrey and I. They are so metaphoric in their work, and they began to film these concepts that existed within Anya’s paintings, essentially in a live action form.

So Anya had this metaphor of refugees: of snails without their shells. They’d lost their homes. This occurs within her paintings.

Inspired by nature that they’re filming, we see her collecting these tiny insects and animals, and it comes through in animations that we do in the film, but also they began to film the snail shells that Anya had collected, and they filmed them with these little dandelions falling through the air in slow motion, and it was just so stunning, and there was this, beauty to it, yet it had this completely obvious feeling that it was bombs falling from the sky, so we began to use this with sound design and it became a very natural transition to move us from a conversation they were having about how their perception of time was affected.

The life was ripped from them and stretched and move into other footage of some of the terrors of what had happened to people.

Their art was always the conduit to move from one place to another, and that way it doesn’t feel in the hand of the editor because these are choices that they’re making in life. How do they talk about something?

As Anya says in the film, “her language is painting.” She’s designed this language for decades, and it’s a more rich way of showing the world without looking at it directly. Slava talks about this concept that news footage gets old.

You watch it and all destruction is the same. In essence, it’s the loss of something. So from the very beginning, Anya said, “We’re not going to focus on that.” We’re going to focus on what may be lost.

And Slava told me, later, actually after we were done with the filming, “Andrey and I were so focused on this - whether it was a person, interview, a flower, or a landscape - this might be the last day of the existence of this person, of this thing, or our existence - filming it.” Their attention was so present.

One of the metaphorical or analogous shots that I was thinking about was when someone says, “We’re ordinary people in an extraordinary situation,” and there’s this beautiful shot of them basically walking through a forest, but in the distance is this huge column of smoke from an explosion.

They were out exploring - as they do - searching for inspiration. Sometimes they’re just looking for a particular color, and they try to replicate that color in glaze. There was a town burning on the horizon. That’s just the daily reality.

In the West, we hear this word “the frontline.” And you think, “You go to the frontline. It’s a line. It’s over there. But the reality is that this war is right outside their doorstep. That’s really hard to wrap your head around, so we wanted to - as best we could - bring people into what that might feel like.

As an editor, how did that develop? You’ve got this great soundbite that you knew you had. Then you’ve got this great shot. How did you determine to put those two together?

We approached this from two sides simultaneously. I told Slava, “I have some things I’m curious about. You don’t have to answer these questions, but I just want to know what you’re thinking.” And he would record these testimonials.

These kind of became voiceovers in the film. He had his own questions. He comes from a family of biologists, and he chose to be a graphic designer. He’d never studied porcelain. Then he chose to get involved with porcelain.

They’re really very curious, very interested, very deeply philosophical, really intrigued people. It’s just amazing. So he would have these recordings, and we would get them. Keep in mind: every single thing we received had to be translated by our ten translators.

So all dailies go to translation. I’d start cutting picture then we’d subtitle everything. We had 2,000 pages of transcripts. So we’d find a soundbite like “We’re ordinary people in an extraordinary situation” and you’d just think, “Oh my God!” That instantly contained the sentiment of that shot that you’re talking about with the smoke rising over the horizon.

Because they work in metaphor, and because that’s how they talk - they’re constantly pontificating, arguing, and joking around. You have this amazing flurry of emotions. We would just pick things that were really beautiful and we’d try them to see how they would speak to each other.

A scene can always be doing several things, right? You can get a sense of place, you can get a sense of action, you can get a sense of emotion, the subtext or suspense. We think, “Okay, we have about an hour and a half to tell this story, but this is people’s lives for almost two years.

We’re using sound as a whole other layer, implying concepts just via a join or juxtaposition or superimposition. So we’re trying to create as much density of feeling as makes sense. On the flip side of this - the way that Aniela and I like to pace the cut - is that we’re presenting something that’s an invitation.

I believe you can never compete with the imagination of the audience, so we need to leave time. We leave time for things to really breathe. Because the mind’s eye is imagining something much more than what we’re even showing on the screen, so there are a lot of rests in the film.

When we didn’t have enough footage for that, we were stretching stuff and just sitting with it. I think that creates an accessibility that we really require. To be able to absorb this, because it’s almost, you can’t take it in, it’s too much.

Avid timeline for Porcelain War

Talk to me about the decisions of the stories you didn’t tell. Something that you loved that you had to cut out?

It’s a tough question. It’s tough on any project, but on this one they’re risking so much to capture this footage. They shot over 500 hours, so we know it’s not all going to go in. We know we’re going to have an enormous distillation and omission of certain things. There were scenes that ended up leaving the film, which I love.

They were very moving, but they would invite so many questions that we didn’t have time to answer. It created a distancing for the audience. It’s not experiential in the way that you need. That’s not ultimately additive.

Even if it contains emotion, or if it’s important, that’s not the ultimate part of the goal. It has to fit into what we’re perceiving, which is that we’re gonna step into their shoes, we’re gonna understand their lives, and why they’re making these choices.

There was one scene they shot, it was really beautiful and horrible. They went to an animal shelter that they support. They would even sell their figurines to donate to the animal shelter. There are many dogs and cats and horses that had lost their owners and they’d been left behind. It was absolutely terrible.

There are these amazing people at Kharkiv Animal Rescue that brings them in and find them homes, it’s fantastic. Slava was going there and helping them. It was a great scene, but it ended up on the cutting room floor.

What happened is it actually became an aspect of the animation instead. So it was redundant. There’s part of the second animation that’s looking at the first days of the war, when these pets were left behind because their owners had to evacuate, so it becomes encapsulated in something that we can do visually, that we can abstract as metaphor.

It was so moving, it still maintained an extreme resonance. So that existed in a different form. Maybe, not better, but more appropriate to everything else. So it has to exist as a part of the whole. That was a guiding principle. But every one of those decisions is unique.

We didn’t do any grants or fundraising in traditional form. We didn’t send links because the footage we had was very sensitive. It had a lot of tactical value to the Russians. We had war footage coming in from multiple synchronized cameras.

We can’t just send people a FrameIO link. But we did have private little screenings to make sure that audiences are understanding this. It’s a verite story. It’s subtitled, so we’ve got a language barrier. A lot of people don’t know about what is it like in Ukraine.

There’s so much information to get through. So we would adjust things in the cut to see what fits and we would try stuff and I would ask questions to the audience. That was really empowering, and it helped us to distill.

Porcelain War team meeting for the first at the airport in Salt Lake City, Utah. L → R: Slava Leontyev (Co-Director, Participant), "Frodo", Brendan Bellomo (Co-Director), Anya Stefanova (Participant)

There’s a lot of music. Tell me about the moments that you chose not to score.

Yes. This is a super great question. I think there’s no more powerful tool in film than silence or black, but you must use these really sparingly. So there were some moments where we knew we would be building to silence, especially after a scene in the film that takes place in Bakhmut – a very terrible battle that’s going on.

One of the members of Slava’s unit is trying to rescue people that have been hurt and she’s running – exposed, being shot at, and it’s a deluge of sound, so you can’t go into that the next scene with music or dialogue or anything.

So we knew we would go down into silence. Then I thought, “Okay, what could be the next sound after this? Something that would allow you to breathe, to feel your own heartbeat… and it was snow falling.

So those kind of decisions were really key in the cut. When to not use stuff was a big decision, and we knew we were building to that. I’m working towards this feeling, and that was mirrored in the use of color.

A lot of times cause I’m grading the film as I go. I’m re-grading the OCN [original camera negative] and getting certain feelings that I want. In that scene when we had the snowfall and we’re coming out of black, I printed it down so the white point is almost a grey blue. It’s a feeling from Andrey’s paintings. It’s heavy.

It’s a very quiet feeling, and I knew we had to have color be in sync with the sound, so I’m working on this stuff - even in the rough cut - because to me, it’s all part of it.

Coming back to how we were working on the music, this was a really unique challenge. I wanted to do some custom score with the band, but they had absolutely zero availability because they’re working to raise funds.

So I go to Tim Stearns and said, “There are scenes, like where they are flying drones and where they’re going into battle. The music has to be from DakhaBrakha, but there’s nothing in their catalog that works What can we do?”

Using stems from their music, Tim builds an entire custom instrument library - cellos, drums, percussion, accordions, phrases, individual notes -  all built in ProTools. He studied the entire library. Everything they’ve ever recorded.

He understands their style as a musician. And he says, I can work within this and honor what we feel they would be bringing to this. So Tim created these music edits, but they’re compositionally honoring and channeling DakhaBrakha, this quartet. So it was a super unique process. It unified these scenes. It maintained their music. A huge gift to the film.

You mentioned that you were color grading as you were going. What is the value of having a graded image in your edit? Because most editors edit with a “one light.” You edit with the one-light the whole time, and at the very end, then you color grade. Why do it during, and how were you doing it during? In the Avid?

On this film - because it’s shot by two artists, the DP is an oil painter - color had an extra level of meaning: a meaning that had editorial importance, which is not super common.

So what I decided would be valuable – thought it’s a little bit more work - is when I encountered something that needed a particular feeling to really honor what Andrey was going for - blue, cold, underexposed, whatever it may be - I would do one of two things: I would either - if I could - grade the DNX [proxies] in Avid using the color tools there, but if they were not powerful enough or not authentic enough, I made sure that the team designed the pipeline for me, so that I could access - at any time - the OCN - the original camera “negative.” 

I opened DaVinci Resolve and would grade it the way I want. I could access the one light grade, so I have a total one to one match with the Avid. Then I say, “Okay, I’m going to print this down two stops and I’m going to go way colder.

Most of the film is graded with “printer lights.” [Printer lights is a relatively crude set of grading tools that basically only allows up or down control of RGB and overall density. It’s the way ALL color grading was done before digital grading.]

It’s all exposure and a white balance and a little bit of contrast, it’s a very straightforward grade because we designed the look to just feel pretty filmic, and it can receive those decisions of exposure and feel authentic.

Then I would render it out, it would replace the DNX, and it would pop back into the Avid. That was very valuable because I could verify that a certain feeling would come through color. That’s not necessary on every project. But for this, it was a part of the story.

A lot of the film has beautiful long shots of nature and art being made. But then you also have the assembling of an AK-47 with jump cuts and just a fury of editing.

That scene is really narratively driven. It’s not supposed to just be texture or montage, but it needed a particular feeling. Slava, in the film, starts to talk about this notion that their culture is under attack.

Artists are being targeted and killed - writers, teachers. If these people are erased, in essence, they’re erasing Ukraine. That’s the goal of the war. So he visits a school that was destroyed. He goes to the second floor of this building, and he’s looking down into the classrooms, and the entire floor is missing, it’s almost sliced, and it’s terrible.

We had this recording where he said something that was profound. He said, “I could run away, but eventually I’ll reach the ocean and I’ll have to turn back and fight anyways.” Oh my god! There’s no choice! It’s not that we want to go to war, or that we want to be a professional soldier. No. They’re very peaceful. They don’t want to fight one minute longer than they have to. 

One day, over Zoom, I saw him working on his sculpture, on this little white-surface table with a little desk lamp, but he was busy. He’s gotta get ready. He had a mission the next day, so he had to start cleaning his gun.

He’s preparing the gun on this table and there’s paintbrushes next to it, and I couldn’t believe it! I said, “Slava, tomorrow, you and Andrusha” - we call Andrey, Andrusha – “you guys must film exactly the same way you’ve been filming all of these shots of you with your brushes and your sculpting.

Put the gun together, clean it, prepare it, and load it. Same lighting, same framing everything.” And they did. It was about 15 minutes long, and we just cut it down to 35 seconds. It was this fury that would transition us from Slava as a sculptor to him as an soldier.

He’s very modest, but he’s one of the top sharp-shooters in Ukraine. He goes to the shooting range and he’s teaching seniors, pregnant women, doctors, home contractors. They have to defend their families.

That was the motivation behind that scene. Slava says weapons are horrible and disgusting, but there’s an honorable purpose to defend their identity, their culture, their families.

There’s a great quote in the movie which is also central: “What I’m living is absolutely not my life.” And in the middle of that, and following that, is gunfire and shouted instructions about how to fire a gun and who to aim it at. Talk to me about choosing not to just run interview bites back to back, but interspersing them with verite soundbites and production sound.

If you’re gonna do a somewhat fragmented style of editing, it has to be motivated. It can’t be a style that you’re imposing. We got to spend a lot of time with them and they’re constantly interrupting each other, changing subjects, trying to deal with something terrible by making a joke.

They’re going from one thing to another. They’re very passionate, they’re inspired, and they’re also really reflective. There’s a lot of introspection.

We know these things are true about them. That is their personalities, then we would reflect this in the cut. This idea became very appealing to Aniela and me. Slava had this statement, “What I’m living, it’s absolutely not my life.”

And we thought, “What more emblematic place could there be for this? Slava not just holding the gun, but teaching others. Seeing his point-of-view. Being in his shoes. The design of that shot was something I helped Andrey with, and the irony is that as the director, I’m not there.

But the work of the director has nothing to do with the physical presence there.

These are descriptions of taste. They are questions that you ask. They are choices that you make, and all of those dialogues are exactly the same - very difficult - but still the intention and the results can mirror each.

When I was watching this, I didn’t know about the animation. So my question is about your choice to animate the porcelain to show what can no longer be shown.

For me, animation is a mode of production. It has many stylistic directions it can take from photorealism to abstraction.

There’s so much range of beauty, but you do not just include animation in any film unless it has narrative meaning - unless it really has a purpose where the film would not work without it. A lot of people say, “I have a documentary. I’d like to do some animation.”

That is completely incorrect. For us, the animation was born of a couple of things. One, from the very beginning we were in love with their work - not just because of the aesthetic was strong - but because it was autobiographical.

They were telling stories on the surface of these figurines and I thought, “This is fantastic.” And two, during the making of the film, I had a disagreement with Slava. He said to me, “We’ve never used time before in our work. I said, “Stop! This is ridiculous! You’ve been using time from the very beginning.

You have seasons, you have movement, you have characters that are aging, changing. You are creating cinema. It is merely frozen on the surface of figurines within the glaze. We’re going to melt this with animation.”

The real question becomes “why?” Why do you need to do use this animation? We don’t have a time machine. We can’t go back to their peaceful life in Crimea. We can’t look at the opening days - the terrible days of the war - and even if we could, we wouldn’t want to do this directly.

What are we going to show? More news footage? You disengage. You put it in a box in your mind. We need to look at that time of their lives through their emotions. They were speaking about what it would be to live in free Ukraine.

They were dreaming of the future, so these three “tenses” became three figurines. These three figurines became pillars of the structure of the film; places where we could get to know their art in its fullest form, so they were absolutely necessary. That’s why we turned to animation.

This is the largest conflict in Europe since World War II, so in an ideal world, we would film everything, we would edit, then we’d do post production. We’d do animation, sound, everything later, but we didn’t have that luxury. We decided we were going to film, we’re going to edit, and we’re going to animate simultaneously.

Everything, every day, seven days a week. We all felt, we cannot leave Ukraine. We can’t go into a Disney 2D-animated world. We need the animation to remain within Ukraine. That puzzle was solved with this idea that the animation would be on the surface of the figurine, but it would remain in the forest, remain in the rubble.

We knew we must have a basis for these stories. Andrey recorded interviews with them, and these conversations were reflective of the art they were making. So Anya made three custom figurines that represented the stories they wanted to share in the film, and we sent them to an animation collective in Poland called BluBlu Studios.

30 animators worked for a year on this. Slava sent them 20 years of photographs of Anya’s work and they studied her style so they could replicate the wing of a butterfly, the way she drew a particular line, and they hand-drew 7, 000 frames of animation.

I was very passionate from the first day that it cannot be some sort of After Effects thing where you’re just gonna stick it on top of the figurine.

No, if they draw a line where they make a little raised bump in Warsaw, Poland I want that to reflect the actual sky over the figurine, the actual broken bricks below it in the rubble - that same color perfectly.

So what we decided to do is design a technique where there’s no CG. The animation of Poland would become glaze and that glaze reflects the actual environment. We did an audio edit. We did a moving storyboard. They’re rough animating the scenes.

Then I taught Andrey and Slava how to film visual effects plates. Then I said, “Guys, we need to go a step further.”

They filmed high dynamic range panoramas from the environments, so we have the sky the exact color. Andrey is filming a color charts. He’s filming mirror balls.

Then they shot 2,000 pictures of this little log, or of the rubble so I could create a 3D model exactly, so the exact colors would calibrate between all these cameras between Los Angeles, Ukraine, Poland.

Porcelain War team meeting for the first at the airport in Salt Lake City, Utah. L→R: Brendan Bellomo (Co-Director), Aniela Sidorska (Producer/editor), Anya Stasenko (Participant), "Frodo", Slava Leontyev (Co-Director, Participant)

We were working in Sydney, Australia on editing and visual effects with Quade Biddle, the fantastic CG supervisor designing this pipe with me, and the result of this is complete artistic transparency.

Their work as artists, goes directly into the glaze and into the screen - a very pure conduit. That was something I felt was so important.

If you did have footage of their beautiful life - if you did have home 8mm footage or whatever they were talking about in the animation - argue that the animation is still the better choice.

That’s a really beautiful question. For me, when I picture the home footage, somehow it does not compete with my imagination of how great their life was. I think it comes down to one thing.

When I see the animation of their snail that they designed with Crimea, Anya’s garden, their community of artists, the river, little fisherman, I fill it with my own feelings because there is space for that. This abstraction allows a lot more authenticity.

Even if they had the most beautiful home movie, they are powerful artists. They invite the imagination of the audience. Why not use that?

Did you do storyboards on the wall?

We had a virtual story chart of the structure of the film.

Trello or something?

We used Lucidchart. Every scene that they shot we would edit it. There would be rough assemblies of everything that came in. Here comes a couple days footage. Let’s see what happens with it, even while we’re waiting for translation.

We were constantly cutting, so every scene that got edited would get posted to Lucidchart. There’s a scene at the shooting range. There’s this scene of them making the Pegasus. There’s this scene of casting.

This scene at the animal shelter, etc. So they all arrive there, then we could begin to play with an order for the scenes and certain emotional points they were looking to hit in the film.

There was a question of: how did you know when to end the film? That ending was a gift from their animation. Their acknowledgement that their future depends on their actions. They don’t know what’s going to happen.

We invite the audience to participate in that unknown. There’s nothing about putting a bow on anything or any sort of conclusion. It’s just this invitation.

So that was a component in the story chart. We’re working this way - narratively mapping the story - then Slava, Andrey, and I all draw, so we’re doing storyboards as well. We do two forms of storyboards: sometimes compositionally it’s so clear because Andrey is a master oil painter. 

I know the composition’s gonna be great, so for him, it’s just a blocking diagram. I say, “Andrushka, it’s mainly this kind of lens.” He says, “I understand.” It’s the ultimate way to make a film. They would go out on a frozen lake, all times of day. They think, “The sun is gonna come down at this time. We’re gonna have tea on the lake, build a little fire, and wait for the right light.”

You were saying how insane it is that they are training and fighting in a war during the day and creating art at night. Now you have to layer on top of that that they’re making a movie and learning how to make a movie!

And learning how to make a movie! Yeah. By the time we were in full swing of production, we sent 15 camera bodies. They had three compact cinema cameras, all these GoPro body cameras, drones. They’re shooting all raw.

They’re uploading an enormous amount of footage. We work with these homeland security and computer security experts to come up with this encrypted pipe so that we could send everything back to these air gapped servers with all these firewalls.

We worked with fact checkers and investigative journalists to verify everything independently, so there’s this whole pipeline that they’re doing. They’re in a war zone and the internet was going out constantly. There’s shelling. There’s power outages.

They couldn’t even turn the lights on or have hot water, let alone upload footage. But when they do, this is a modern European city and they’ve got way faster internet than I do in Los Angeles. They have terabytes of material, and it’s filling up all the servers.

I’ve done a video work with Christian missionaries in the Middle East and North Africa, and those people can be killed there, so I’ve done all of the same stuff that you’re talking about to keep them safe. You have to make sure that Putin doesn’t find out where Slava lives.

100%. This was constantly on our minds and we were talking with Slava about this in the very beginning. Their safety is an absolute priority - top priority above anything else. But Slava says to me, “We’re at no more risk than a nine month old baby or a grandmother. Every civilian in Ukraine is being targeted.

My name is already on a list” because he’s an artist. That said, we did everything that we could. They’re filming multiple synchronized perspectives of missions. This is remarkable, potentially very sensitive information about how everything’s operating.

So we said not only are we going to protect and encrypt the footage, we’re going to remain three months behind with anything released in the final film, because by 90 day’s time they’re on a new mission and the tactical value is zero.

Everybody’s using code names, but they’re still showing their faces and that’s an act of courage for them. I talked with the members of Slava’s unit about this and they said, “If we can show what we’re going through throughout the day, maybe somebody else doesn’t have to be in our shoes in the future.”

You touched on the structure of the film, and I wanted to point out the unusual nature of it just by this one thought: the first day of the attack on Ukraine is told after the halfway mark of the film. So what was guiding your structure of the film?

To begin with, the attack doesn’t give you a chance to really understand where they’re coming from. The way we chose to edit this was to have the opening days of the war occur very late in the film - almost at about the midpoint.

Had we picked the beginning minutes of the film to show the beginning of the invasion, we would rob the audience of an opportunity to understand what came before. We could show refugees going into the subway and shelling.

We could show this animation of them having to leave behind their pets, these terrible things, but you have a decreased ability to fully understand what that means if we don’t know what their lives were like before.

This is one of those instances where nonlinear storytelling is more emotionally linear. So the order of the scenes needs to follow Something else it’s not just about timeline. There’s an emotional progression. So the number one thing in any film is the emotion. The information can come in a different order.

You need to care about the people that are going to be in jeopardy later.

I’ve never made even a short documentary before. As filmmakers and screenwriters, this is what we know – Aniela and I - and we can’t be unfaithful to our nature.

Talk about the choice to follow the gorgeous and heartbreaking scene of Andrey’s daughters talking about missing their dad and getting hugs with the images of actual dead bodies in the street and blood.

Andrey, our cinematographer, has been separated from his family. One of the stories in the film is he talks about how he brought his wife and his daughters to safety across the border. Then we speak with the daughters.

They had their own experience to share: the innocence of these two young girls, their love of their family, to honor what they’re going through is to share the context that this love is happening which is that people in their community are dying and it’s not to provoke any sort of reaction. It’s merely a statement about what they’re going through.

These things are close in the edit - not directly next to each other - but they’re around the same emotional moment of the film. 

This is something where I really followed Aniela’s intuition because when she grew up - it’s not the same situation, but there was a parallel – her father was in the resistance, in the Solidarity movement in Poland, and they were separated for five years.

He went to a refugee camp in Italy. There were tanks on the streets. There was a shortage of food. It was a really terrible time.

It was a dangerous time - not nearly as dangerous as Ukraine, but there were parallels - and that estrangement, that distance, and having a situation that you don’t understand as a young girl was something that really she took the lead on in the cut.

As an editor, there were times we were reviewing dailies that it was very emotional for her. There were other times when she was coming at it with total objectivity. We’re just trying to solve continuity issues or how we condense something.

The good thing about that is, is there’s this wall of process that lets you still deal with the material - not to speak for her - but I think there’s a very cathartically valuable experience to tell a story that you relate to and it’s something you can never come to terms with, but to engage with it and to help other people share their story is something that could heal on some level.

Is subtext important in a documentary? Can you think of how you generated subtext or tried to reveal subtext?

Subtext is critical. I think it’s one of the great powers of cinema. I think when we are editing films, sometimes it’s a conscious decision. Other times it’s subconscious. There was one scene where we were trying to figure out where we would place a voiceover from Slava.

He says “Freedom is paradoxical. In order to defend it, you have to give up your freedom.” It’s this incredible statement, and I had a realization that this must occur in the scene where he’s standing on a frozen lake: a precarious place where you might break through to a dangerous terror at any moment, but on the surface, he’s playing.

He’s skating on the ice. He’s throwing his glove like a ball for his dog. It’s a beautiful moment, and yet there’s a tension. It gives it extra power. I’m not gonna just cut to a close-up of him saying this.

It’s the same information - maybe the same emotion - but it does not have the power of this subtext. I thought, “We cannot deny that power to the people in the film. They deserve to have every level of their emotion available for the audience.”

I usually think I pick up on all those little subtexts, but I remember that scene and I never thought of that subtext. It never occurred to me. But there’s no reason not to put it in just because one idiot misses it

Exactly. That’s the beauty of those things. They’re there sometimes for the third time that you see something or they leave a feeling that you realize later without realizing it.

There is the notion that there are things that you don’t articulate as an audience member, even in your own internal monologue, you’re watching the movie - we’re timing the edit around what we think people might be feeling and thinking inside.

Whether that stuff registers or if it doesn’t register, that’s not the point. It’s got an explorative aspect to it -  something that’s a little multilayered.

Director/editor Brendan Bellomo

Thank you so much for joining me to talk about the making of this film. I hope everybody gets a chance to watch it and congratulations about all the success.

Thank you so much for a beautiful conversation and for your interest in this and for so many poignant and fascinating questions. I haven’t had the opportunity to talk about a lot of what we discussed today. So that’s really special for me. And it’s just great to meet you, Stephen. Thanks for this.