Escaping Putin

Michael Town – Post Producer

From the outset we knew that this would be a unique project. In the midst of the ongoing war in Ukraine the Production Team wanted to tell the stories of Russian citizens opposed to the conflict, of those who had fled the country and, in some cases, even their military posts. We discussed the difficulties the team would face in getting the necessary access and footage which meant that it would be an open-ended project with pauses throughout as they continued to gather material.

The stop/start nature of the project was overcome by keeping in constant contact with Producer/Director Jonna McIver throughout and planning our next steps every time we needed to take a pause. This was why we wanted David Ormston in Offline as he has such a refined understanding of the way in which the News team operates and could easily adapt to the workflow. Once we moved into Final Post, the process was seamless with all team members briefed ahead of time so they could hit the ground running.

Although no AI was used in the final piece, the project proved to be an interesting case study in how it could be used during the Offline process to aid in storyboarding and testing ideas. The decision was made to go down the animated route where footage was unavailable, and to use Generative AI to create placeholder scenes to give an idea of the overall structure of the piece. This would also help determine what might end up in the finished edit before engaging the animator. Not only was this cost effective from a Production point of view, but it also helped the team greatly during the review and feedback process giving everyone involved a better understanding of what they were trying to achieve.

Given that we started work on Escaping Putin back in early 2024, this story is still as timely and relevant now as it was then, particularly in light of ongoing world affairs. Many of the stories of the war have focused on the people of Ukraine – and rightly so – but this piece gives us a rare, humanising glimpse into the other side and an insight into how conflicts like this are much more complex than what first meets the eye and can rarely be broken down into a binary view of just one side versus another. The team from Sky News have done a brilliant job in researching and chasing this story, and I’m very proud of the work we did here at Sky Post Production to help them bring it to light.

David Ormston – Offline Editor

Escaping Putin was a sensitive project which also turned out to be a real learning curve for both me and Jonna McIver, the Producer/Director. We had our first days together in the edit suite in early autumn, pulling a couple of rough scenes together and the thing that struck me immediately was the power of the project. Most of the interviews and actuality were in Russian so we used an AI-based transcription tool (Trint) to transcribe those into Russian, and then translate into English, creating subtitles to import into Avid so we could roughly edit the Russian into some kind of structure. I then used Google Translate to hone it down further before finally getting a Russian speaker to check the edits.

Our next task was to determine how to build the story from all the elements including the charity Idite Lesom, the deserter who had been through hell and survived, the war itself and the geopolitics of the region. Jonna had travelled widely filming in Georgia, Serbia, Albania, and Spain and then on top of that we also had some UGC (User Generated Content) from the frontline as well as access to agency footage. We started by breaking the film down into scenes and working out a rough structure starting with the sequences around Dmitry. We soon realized that illustrating his experiences would be difficult as we only had limited footage from the frontline. Jonna had already made a start on an idea to resolve this using Gen AI to create video of those experiences. These were highly stylized to ensure that nobody was confused that this was real footage. We fully engaged with the Gen AI team within Sky which helped us massively with the pace and timing of the film and also gave us opportunities for nearly real-time tweaks as the sequences came together.

From the start of the process we wanted to create a film that felt different and relevant. It has been a lot of hard work but I feel that we have produced something to be proud of.

Colourist – Ben Whitney

Escaping Putin is a highly emotive and hard-hitting project with some very distinctive and different looking sections. It’s a mixture of camera rushes (Sony S-Log), archive material and some phone footage. The archive footage varied in quality and appearance, so I had to balance each section accordingly to make it appear homogenous and even. The phone footage was generally not too bad to work with. A couple of the phone clips had a noticeable flicker with them due to LED lighting which was reduced in Baselight using the de-flicker tool. The S-Log footage was relatively easy to grade as the highlights and shadows could be restored when/if needed.

To give me an idea of the look he was after for the main sections of the documentary, Jonna sent me some screenshots of a TV series he'd seen featuring a desaturated grade with a slight green bias. For the later rock-climbing and Barcelona sections, the look needed to be quite different and more positive: rich, warm and vibrant.

This is an important and powerful story that helps to keep the situation in Ukraine to the fore. It also highlights an aspect of the conflict that we don’t often hear about. Many Russians are also opposed to the war and are doing all they can to make that known and help those who feel the same way.

Tatjana Radivoj - Re-recording Mixer

My brief from the Director included making the dialogue sound as natural as possible, adding sound design to the animations to help illustrate some of the main character's experiences and to bring them to life, as well as adding any sound effects and details I thought would help enhance the rest of the piece.

I have worked on quite a few documentaries about war but this was the first one I had worked on, or even heard of, that focused so much on deserters and people opposed to the conflict, so I was especially conscious of being careful and tasteful with appropriate effects when sound-designing lived experiences. 

There were also non-anonymous interviews with the members and founders of the charity organisation which needed more standard treatment but varied in recording location (e.g. rock-climbing canyon, indoors, on the top of a hill), so I did a thorough lay-up of background sound effects (wind, city traffic etc.) to add to these. I always really enjoy this aspect of a mix as it adds so much texture to the scenes. There was also music which needed balancing with the other elements as appropriate for emotion, tension, and dialogue focus/intelligibility. 

I am very pleased with the outcome of this mix and feel very grateful to have worked on such an important documentary. I think it’s really powerful and shines an important light on the devastating and lasting impact that war has on soldiers. It does so in a way that gives us an understanding and feeling of the impacts of war on a personal and human level. 

Jennifer Ford – Online Editor

There was a lot of archive material with various non-native frame rates to deal with and these I tidied up as much as possible with the client in the suite. They were excellent to work with and very organised which was vital as the final sign-off had to be done by link as they were off filming their next project, but it all worked really well and Jonna was very happy.

I found the documentary a really powerful and moving experience. It's shocking to hear testimonials about the horrendous conditions that the solders have to endure as well as risking their lives for something that they don't believe in. The documentary also shows a side that I think many of us would never even have thought about - how so many Russians are opposed to the war in Ukraine. It's a thought-provoking watch but also has a strong sense of hope for the future.