Our Hands: A Imigrant Story

Inspiration

Our Hands began with a line spoken by my grandmother shortly after our family immigrated to the United States: “We work with our hands so our children can work with their minds, and their children with their hearts.” That phrase became the emotional center of a song in my musical Nasha America, inspired by the 1980s Soviet Jewish refugee movement. When we needed a way for producers to experience the world of the show, this song became the perfect starting point and ultimately the seed for this animated short.

What it does

The film brings the immigrant journey to life through music and AI-assisted animation. It tells the story of a family rebuilding their lives in Brighton Beach after fleeing Soviet Ukraine, highlighting the sacrifices, hope, and generational wisdom that shaped their new beginning. The project preserves cultural memory while demonstrating how technology can support authentic, human-centered storytelling.

How we built it

We began by professionally recording the song in a New York studio with actors from Nasha America, working closely with our musical director to capture the emotional nuance at the core of the piece. This gave us a fully realized vocal performance before any visuals were created.

From there, we developed a written script, breaking the song into a clear, scene-by-scene sequence. Once the structure was set, we used Midjourney to establish the visual language of the film. This phase became its own creative discipline: each Midjourney prompt was an exercise in learning how to describe a scene in words—the mood, the lighting, the emotional beats, the character posture, the subtle details. Very quickly, we learned that consistency depended on language.

So we stacked prompts across scenes, refining a shared vocabulary for characters, environments, and tone. This allowed us to maintain continuity shot to shot, even as the visuals evolved.

With the art direction locked, we moved into full character creation. Starting from pure text prompts (no reference images), we iterated through dozens of prompt variations to achieve recognizable, stable characters who felt emotionally grounded and historically accurate.

We then built each scene visually, typically generating twenty or more variations per moment to explore different compositions and gestures. Once we had strong stills, we brought everything into Runway, laying the images out sequentially to test pacing and clarity. This was a crucial checkpoint: we needed to see whether the story read without sound.

After refining the stills and adding small-motion treatments, we used Runway’s animation tools to animate each scene, adjusting timing, camera movement, and transitions. Throughout the entire process, we completed roughly thirty rounds of revision—testing, iterating, and reshaping until the emotional arc worked.

In the end, the combination of a professional studio recording, detailed prompting work, AI-assisted design, and careful animation allowed a small team, working nights and weekends, to create a fully realized three-minute animated film that brings the world of Nasha America to life.

Challenges we ran into

• Character consistency using only words:

One of our biggest challenges was generating consistent characters across dozens of scenes using text-only prompts. With the tools available at the time, true consistency wasn’t yet possible, so each prompt required careful crafting, stacking, and manual correction to stabilize appearances.

• World consistency from scene to scene:

Maintaining a cohesive visual world purely through language was equally difficult. Lighting, clothing, architecture, and even the era-specific details of Brighton Beach shifted unpredictably. We had to develop a shared “prompt vocabulary” to keep the environment unified.

• Subtle, realistic emotions instead of exaggerated ones:

Midjourney often exaggerated expressions—huge smiles, over-the-top anger, or melodramatic reactions. Our story required subtle acting: quiet exhaustion, tenderness, hesitation, hope. Achieving this meant generating dozens of variants per scene and selecting the few that conveyed genuine emotion.

• Making the story work with the music:

Because the film is driven by a song, we had to figure out how to align visuals with musical pacing, emotional beats, and lyrical meaning. Timing and rhythm became critical. A beautiful image meant nothing if it didn’t land on the right musical moment.

• Keeping the art direction intact during animation:

Runway’s animation tools were powerful but unpredictable. Characters could morph, lose features, or drift away from the art direction we had established. We had to constantly refine prompts, adjust settings, and animate in very small increments to preserve consistency.

• Maintaining correct pacing in animation:

Getting scenes to “breathe” in sync with the music required reworking timing again and again. Shots that felt too fast became confusing; shots that lingered too long broke the emotional arc.

• Learning the importance of camera angles:

Early on, every shot looked the same because we hadn’t specified camera angles. Once we learned to prompt for perspective—close-ups, wide shots, over-the-shoulder—the storytelling improved dramatically. We essentially taught ourselves cinematography inside AI tools.

• Identifying where visuals alone were not enough:

Some story beats were too subtle to express visually through AI. We had to learn when to lean on text overlays or lyric emphasis to clarify plot points and emotional transitions.

• Iterating through audience feedback: 

We tested early versions with friends and collaborators, constantly asking: “Is anything confusing?” Each round revealed clarity issues we hadn’t noticed.Eventually—after about thirty iterations—something shifted. Viewers stopped asking logistical questions and instead began tearing up consistently. That’s when we knew the story was finally landing the way we hoped.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re incredibly proud that Our Hands has resonated so deeply with audiences—especially with our own families. Watching my parents tear up as they saw their immigrant journey reflected on screen was one of the most meaningful moments of this entire project.

The film has already begun receiving recognition, winning Best Animation at its first festival and earning three Telly Awards for Best Music Video, AI Animation, and Musical Score. These honors validated both our emotional intent and the technical innovation behind the piece.

But the accomplishment we’re proudest of goes beyond awards. When we share the film with people from our Soviet Jewish immigrant community, they say, “This represents us.” Many shed a tear. This community is aging, its memories fading, and it would have been impossible to recreate its world with traditional resources. Thanks to generative AI, we were able to resurrect a foreign, vanished world—its kitchens, its hallways, its storefronts, its hopes—and preserve something that might otherwise disappear.

For a small team working nights and weekends, being able to recreate and honor that world is the accomplishment that matters most.

What we learned

We learned that AI is not a shortcut—it’s a new creative medium that requires direction, patience, vision, and a willingness to rewrite the rules of the workflow. We had to think like filmmakers, animators, writers, and technologists all at once, and every phase—from prompting to pacing to character consistency—asked us to develop new skills in real time.

We learned how critical language is. Because everything began with text-only prompts, we had to discover the exact vocabulary that could control mood, style, character identity, and emotional subtlety. Crafting the right words became as important as crafting the right images.

We learned how to align music and visuals, where cinematic pacing meets musical structure. The storytelling only worked once the animation truly breathed with the phrasing of the song.

We learned the importance of feedback. Showing early versions to friends and collaborators revealed clarity issues we couldn’t see ourselves. Over time, as more people began to tear up—and fewer asked “wait, what’s happening here?”—we learned how to tune the emotional arc.

We learned that certain story beats simply couldn’t be expressed visually through AI. Knowing when to rely on text, lyrics, or specific framing became part of the craft.

Most importantly, we learned that generative AI can help preserve cultural memory. It allowed us to recreate a world—our Soviet Jewish immigrant upbringing—that no longer exists and would have been impossible to rebuild with traditional resources. Through this process, we discovered that AI, when guided by human storytelling, can help resurrect disappearing communities and honor the people who shaped them.

What's next for Our Hands: A Imigrant Story

Our Hands is part of a larger vision: the development of Nasha America (formerly Fallout), the full-length musical from which the song originates. We are actively preparing the show for a Broadway trajectory, and this animated short has already become an essential tool in that process.

Musicals are incredibly expensive and time-intensive to mount, and it can be difficult for producers, investors, and collaborators to fully “see” the world of a new work during early development. This animation offers a solution—it allows people to experience the tone, emotion, and cultural setting of Nasha America in a completely different medium, without staging, without misdirection, and without the limitations of a reading room.

We’ve already used the film to help partners understand the world of the show, and it has sparked genuine excitement and inspiration. Moving forward, we plan to use Our Hands to build buzz, introduce new audiences to the heart of the musical, and potentially expand this visual approach into additional songs. Over time, we hope to create a full animated “lookbook” that supports the Broadway development path while giving the community a way to connect with a story that reflects their history.

Our next steps include further festival submissions, continued refinement of the show, and strategic sharing of the animation as we bring Nasha America closer to the stage.

Built With

• minjourney
• runwayml