shots Unsigned: Daria Korsak

Daria Korsak is a director and editor who specialises in CGI and VFX-heavy workflows.

The reason for our interview with Korsak is her a 13-minute experimental music video for the multi-Grammy-winning artist Imogen Heap I AM ___.

Korsak directed, edited, produced and oversaw the visual effects, holding a team of nearly 100 collaborators together across two years, much of it after hours, while working full-time as an editor.

Can you tell us a little about your background and your route into directing?

I always wanted to direct, but didn't get the chance to start until 2023, a year after I moved to London, having fled the war in Ukraine.

I had lost my home and job, whilst my friends and family were suddenly scattered across the world or fighting on the frontline. I had also been forced to leave my then partner behind, since men of conscription age couldn't cross the border. I was 22, grieving, broke and in survival mode, so pursuing a film career in one of the most expensive cities in the world felt like a distant priority.

I had lost my home and job, whilst my friends and family were suddenly scattered across the world or fighting on the frontline.

And then I got extraordinarily lucky. I was eligible for the Homes for Ukraine scheme, which paired refugees with British families willing to host them for six months or more, and eventually got accepted by Imogen Heap, who happened to have a spare room.

I spent my first year in London editing for clients like Vice, i-D and Boiler Room, and I still work full-time as an editor. The pivotal moment of my career was one evening in January 2023, when Imogen invited me to her studio and played me this epic 13- minute song, I AM __, that she was working on. I told her I wanted to make a music video for it – she laughed at first but eventually trusted me to lead the project, even though I'd never directed anything before. Imogen had a lot of faith in me, for which I’ll always be grateful. I was quite honoured when the music video did very well on the award circuit, but fulfilling her trust was the most important thing. It was released less than a year ago, so I guess I'm still at the very beginning of my directing career. 

Above: Daria at the Creative Circle New Talent Ceremony.

Did you study filmmaking? How did you learn your craft?

I grew up in a rundown Soviet-era block, and my formative years were largely about escaping into imaginary worlds. It wasn't entertainment so much as my whole life, I'd rewatch my favourite films every evening and mourn for days when a favourite TV show ended, so I eventually developed an odd dislike for the fact that directors and writers controlled how long my escapism lasted. I think that dislike was the foundation of my desire to build those worlds myself.

I started editing at nine, downloading TV shows from pirate sources and re-cutting them into alternative storylines or music videos, then I was filming vlogs at summer camp and birthday videos for friends.

I knew early on that my family couldn't afford university, and they kept telling me that a creative career was only for the wealthy. 

I knew early on that my family couldn't afford university, and they kept telling me that a creative career was only for the wealthy. I studied hard at school and won two full tuition scholarships: one in journalism in Ukraine, another in theatre directing in Denmark, and ended up balancing both universities at once.

I started working as a freelance editor at 19, but my commercial and music video career really only began in London. I've largely learned on the job and continually tried to push my boundaries.

Would you say you have a directing style? How did you arrive at it?

I think my style is being shaped by unconventional briefs and post-production-heavy workflows. I'm mainly drawn to otherworldly visuals, things you couldn't fully capture on camera because they don't actually exist! I want to keep building them by combining CGI, VFX and live-action, and leaning on AI a lot for pipeline automation and solving various problems along the way, though I'm not particularly interested in text-to-video generation.

My most recent project, a short visualiser for Jon Hopkins and Imogen Heap, is my favourite piece of work this year. They wanted a video built from a single unaltered 2D photo of them, without any obvious generative AI. I explored 3D Gaussian Splatting, a technique that normally needs multiple viewpoints or moving footage, neither of which I was given, and made it work by essentially breaking an algorithm designed for different tasks. Then it took a lot of compositing and camerawork in 3D to bring it all together. I'd like to keep exploring how AI could support human artistry without trying to replace it. 

Another benefit that comes with technology-driven workflows is what feels like greater creative control.

Another benefit that comes with technology-driven workflows is what feels like greater creative control. As a student I spent five years in theatre, as both actor and director, and then I worked as a 3rd AD on a feature for about seven months. Both the theatre stage and film set were full of distractions and limitations, an inevitable consequence of working in the physical world, in real time. I think that projects heavy with CGI, VFX and AI trade one set of problems for a different set that I find far easier to work with. I'm still dependent on other people, budgets, shoots and tech, but I have far more freedom to realise whatever I can possibly imagine.

What was the inspiration behind your short film?

In the middle section of I AM ___ , incidentally one of my favourite Imogen Heap pieces to date, there are these two minutes of quite harsh experimental noise. I love art that makes me feel something, and that section reflects what's happening in my head on a daily basis. Hearing it externalised for the first time made me feel far less alone in how I operate, and I desperately wanted to visualise its "everything, everywhere, all at once" energy.

Other than that, the video was inspired by the song itself, which is about power play. The initial brief changed from exploring personal domination to contemplating how to find the balance in the likely man-vs-machine future, as both Imogen and I agreed this was where the world was heading. 

What other directors' work do you admire, and why?

I admire directors who don't just tell great stories, but empower others to tell theirs. I wouldn't have believed in myself at all if it weren't for Vibeke Wrede, the absolutely fascinating and endlessly kind Danish director, writer and my mentor at theatre school. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is of course best known as a showrunner, writer and actress, but I'd still like to mention her name because she's one of the most brilliant people in the film industry. I think the range and consistent quality of her work across genres are remarkable and deeply inspiring.

Spike Jonze holds a special place in my heart for translating his visually trippy, narratively deep, endlessly ironic style equally well across features and branded shorts. I also adore Paul Thomas Anderson, Paolo Sorrentino, Damien Chazelle and Jim Jarmusch, precisely because their work is performance-centred, cinematic and grounded in reality – everything I'll probably never be able to do myself, which I find refreshing. 

I believe that good art is at its best when, just like good science, it solves a significant problem that matters to people.

Also a huge shout-out to Gints Zilbalodis, who proved that award-winning animation is possible with relatively small teams and open-source tools. I went to a panel he was on, and I loved how he answered a work-life balance question with “What do you mean? My work is my life” something I relate to, for better or worse. He also has a very familiar, hits-close-to-home Eastern European edge, best summed up by a photo of him eating a McDonald's burger straight after collecting his Golden Globe.

Where do you find the inspiration for your projects?

Music, literature, complex creative briefs, resource-constrained problems with no obvious solutions.

I think restrictions are an excellent booster for creativity, provided you have an idea you really want to bring to life and enough passion to not give up. I believe that good art is at its best when, just like good science, it solves a significant problem that matters to people.

Music is close to a religion for me, I've listened to it for hours every day of my life since I was ten. It's incredibly surreal that I now get to work with artists who were "there for me" through headphones during all my highs and lows, and it’s also an unbelievable privilege. 

Above: Daria at the Kinsale Shark Awards ceremony.

How long was the shoot, and what were the biggest difficulties in pulling this project together?

We spent months in pre-production, with Deadbeat Films and their live-action director and writer, Boris Thompson-Roylance, joining for co-development. The shoot itself was three days, and post-production took two and a half years, which was undeniably the biggest difficulty.

We didn't expect it to run that long, of course. We initially contracted a local studio to handle most of the CGI and VFX, which was about 70% of the film, but couldn't use most of their work in the end, it was stylistically too far from what we wanted. Imogen's label decided further investment was too risky, Deadbeat's and visual artists' contracts ended. I ran out of money too, so I took a full-time job as an in-house editor to stay afloat.

What followed was nearly two years of evenings and weekends of Imogen and me working together in her kitchen after her daughter's bedtime. We probably spent more than a hundred hours in total re-cutting the middle “noise” section frame by frame using layers supplied by an amazing visual artist called Robert Seidel. I also trained myself in After Effects and Blender to close as many gaps as possible on my own.

At some point Imogen showed our work-in-progress cut at BFI Expanded and told the audience we needed driven VFX collaborators. Jimmy Zhu, a senior VFX editor, came up to me afterwards and said he saw real potential in the project. He brought in his friend, compositor Eunsoo Kwon, who agreed to help despite the lack of substantial post-production budget. Jimmy also worked on some hero shots himself and stayed with us from that day to the premiere, on top of his highly demanding job.

when I AM ___ came out, its complexity worked against it, last year generative tools had become so common that audiences assumed most of it was AI-made.

3D artist and director Ryan Vautier was the other person who saved the day, he handled all the CGI scenes and returned for every emergency, often at mate's rates and over the weekends, while juggling parenthood, a house renovation and other projects.

Another challenge was the initial audience response: when I AM ___ came out, its complexity worked against it, last year generative tools had become so common that audiences assumed most of it was AI-made. I then created a detailed five-minute case study that laid out the human.