What student brigades do

About the project

The brief and the answer

The Russian Student Brigades are the largest student organisation in Russia, and that was the whole difficulty: one minute had to cover not one activity but all of them, and do it at speed. We built the film as a mockumentary — a crew is shooting a promo about the brigades, and inside that frame the brigades take their turns. An interview on a yellow backdrop in a uniform jacket covered in badges; builders in orange hard hats with a hammer drill and a drawing of the Kaliningrad stadium captioned “that’s me”; a driver at the wheel of a tractor; a railway conductor beside a train; a waiter with a tray; the teaching brigade; and a very solemn scene in which stacks of employment record books are stamped with the RSO seal — because a season in a brigade counts towards your official work record. It ends on a night campfire and the Russian Student Brigades logo. The device is visible in the framing itself: the outer, behind-the-camera layer is shot wide, while the “documentary” inserts run in a narrow, almost square format with a film texture, so you can always see where the film ends and the film about the film begins. A month for all of it.

• Script
• Directing
• Producing
• Cinematography
• Editing
• Colour grading
• VFX

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