Macleod's Russia (1981)

Concept and creative process

Titles for a series of programmes about Donny Macleod's journey to the Soviet Union to film its wide variety of peoples and cultures. For the title sequence designer Dick Burn filmed a Soviet flag live action waving back and forth in and out of shot to create a series of wipes between scenes of Macleod’s arrival and scenes of everyday life in Soviet Russia. Over a world globe rotating to show the vastness of the Soviet Union, a Soviet 5-pointed star with hammer and sickle zooms up revolving into close-up – instead of Lenin it bears a Soviet style bas-relief portrait of Donny Macleod over which the titles are superimposed in Cyrillic and in English.