Chernobyl and the Moving Image

Today, we had the amazing Slovakian filmmaker Anton "Tony" Fedorko as a guest speaker at our institute and were able to see his documentary work on Chernobyl and the surrounding zones. He accompanied the screening of his material with narrations of his trips and their circumstances as well as historical and scientific background information.

With help of his Ronin stabiliser, Tony was able to capture the different zones around Chernobyl in a vivid and cinematic style that made you feel like you were there yourself, flying over the scattered objects that were left behind when the habitants had to evacuate the zone around Chernobyl. Since the use of his Ronin-device comes with a few special caveats, he mostly deployed automatic settings and a wide lens with deep depth of field to counteract the fact that he was not able to manipulate these factors while simultaneously operating the stabiliser. This is also the reason why he did not capture any sound on scene but rather added soundscapes afterwards. Down below you can get a glimpse of what his screening looked like:

Given the restrictions he had when operating the Ronin, he did a marvellous piece of work. I don't mind that he was not able to capture much sound, since I think his choice of background music really suited and underlined the fact that he was in an area that is largely uninhibited. It really matched the void feeling you get considering how and what happened in Chernobyl more than 30 years ago. And the super deep depth of field gave the feeling as if one would see this from the eye of a remote-controlled vehicle.

References:

Donuts Factory. (2017) Private Chernobyl Tour in Ukraine | CHERNOBYLwel.come. [online]. http://bit.ly/2hi094x