Surma: The Ukranian Shop from vision tekne on Vimeo.

This is a mini documentary Xue Hou, Tom Rossini & I created for our Video for New Media class. Our original idea was to interview someone and get him/her to tell us how the East Village has changed over the years. I thought of this guy that owns an ice cream/newspaper storefront on Avenue A. I think he’s been around at least 20-25 years, probably a lot more.

We decided to go with a Ukrianian American family that owns a building on Tom’s block on E. 7th St. Coincidentally, I actually lived in that very building some 10 years ago, but my stay there was brief and I didn’t get to know the owner and family at all.

We shot about 2.5 hours of footage and the idea was to mesh the generational perspectives into a creative and possibly abstract descriptive piece. One of them had mentioned how the church down the street had changed over the decades and when we went over to shoot it, unwittingly discovered The Ukrianian Shop across the street. I’ve been down that block so many times over many years – and I never once really noticed it.

After realizing our idea would take way too much time to go through and edit, more time than we had before it was due – we decided to document the shop. We figured it’d be like a little news piece. We got most everything in 35 minutes + photos we took and some others online.

The shop is pretty awesome inside. It’s been around since 1918 and in it’s current location at 11 E. 7th st since the 1940s or 1950s.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 10:28 am and is filed under ITP, NYC, Video for New Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.