01 Dec 2008
Hush City of Minsk
Maybe this is the best creative project of the year. Last week the link to the web-page of this project appeared in the blogs of many of my online-friends and moved to Facebook-profiles and other online platforms. Everyone has been discussing and recommending a sketch-movie by “Ilya Andreyev and the team” about Minsk – “Hush City“. The team of people who created “Hush City” found each other through blogs. Hardly there is another project of this kind that would come out of the Belarusian blog sphere. “Hush City” impresses with an original and creative way of story-telling.
This sketch film may become something like a business card for the city, as it is devoted to Minsk and its residents. The project does create a certain impression of the city and might be perceived as a little biased, but the amount of beautiful pictures with sites of Minsk cannot but impress and give a good insight into the life of the Belarusian capital. This is probably the best way to experience Minsk from the Internet. Generation.by recommends you this sketch film as a chance to take a trip to the capital of Belarus.
The project is a creative composition of photo-art, animation, music, web-design and story-telling. This is a result of the work of 15 different people:
The people involved are quite diverse and do rather different things in life, among them: DJing, copywriting, sound- and video-design, photography, event management, studying art and many others.
The web-page and the movie is only in the English language. The authors explain:
Minsk is a mainly Russian-speaking city but the project is done completely in English. This is due to the environment of the project, which is the Internet. We wanted «Hush City» to be accessible and understandable worldwide.
The movie is romantic, melancholic, a bit mysterious and sad, but beautiful. This is exactly how the life of a “hushed city” is. At the same time it is about life, just another story, and this is why it will be easy for everyone to understand it.
To the creators this “media event”, as they call it themselves, is an attempt to raise the issue of Minsk being an unremarkable metropolis in Eastern Europe; a hushed in time city which has not developed during the last 20 years. The city that amazes visitors with its quietness and cleanliness, or even sterility – clean streets, almost no outdoor promotion, no shopping streets, no bars open after midnight, a few clubs, etc.. The sketch film does not say how to change this “status quo”. This is a question for the inhabitants of the city on the first place, because this is their life stories (projects, events, activities, etc.) that create the city and its atmosphere.
The authors ask only one thing from the people who liked their project – to promote it in their own web-pages. A fair request, and that is why we happily fulfill it. According to the concept, the authors wanted to give a little boost to the hushed city with their sketch movie. Let’s hope that “Hush city” will become a good example to follow for other creative people and soon more original projects like this will appear in Belarus.