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RamSinghKumaresh Animation Masterclasses in Mumbai : Report
The 3 part Animation Masterclass by RamSinghKumaresh debuted in Mumbai on April 24th, 2010. AAA was to cover all the 3 modules but due to unavoidable circumstances, I missed the first one. So the report extensively covers Modules 2 & 3 while for Module 1, we have a photo slideshow (courtesy @RamSinghKumaresh) and feedback from some participants.
Although the coverage is in great detail, it in no way makes up for the masterclass itself. There is a lot more to be gained from actually attending such educational workshops and learning first-hand from these veterans and benefit from their experiences during their long, illustrious careers.
Therefore, my heartfelt advice to all those who are serious about making careers in the field of animation, please do not miss such masterclasses and workshops. If you have the opportunity to learn from someone who has been in the field for a while and made a name for himself/herself, please make the most of it. You will learn much more than any school or institute can teach you.
REPORT LINKS:
Module 1: click here
Module 2: click here
Module 3: click here
RamSinghKumaresh Animation Masterclass Module 1
A visual tour of Module 1 of the RSK Animation Masterclass.
Sorry folks, I missed this one due to bad health, so there’s no detailed report to accompany the pictures but I promise to make up with the next 2 modules.
Also for a quick review from a participant’s perspective, head over to Kshiraj’s blog. Kshiraj is an upcoming artist and animator based in Delhi who travelled all the way to Mumbai just to attend the RSK Masterclass Module 1. What dedication! If more of our aspiring animators would have this kind of enthusiasm for learning, our animation industry would see far greater progress. He couldn’t stay for the other two and had to head back home, so the reports of Module 2 and 3 are specially dedicated to Kshiraj and many other rising stars of Indian animation.
Other Reports:
Module 2: click here
Module 3: click here
RamSinghKumaresh Animation Masterclass Module 2
Having missed Module 1 of RamSinghKumaresh’s Animation Masterclass, I wanted to ensure that I attend the remaining two modules. Braving crazy Mumbai rush-hour traffic, I reached the venue - Whistling Woods International’s Karma Auditorium, only to find myself 15 minutes late!
Luckily for me, Vaibhav (KUMARESH) was just doing a recap of the last module. The auditorium this time was much smaller and better suited to the size of the audience. It felt more intimate - like an actual classroom - and this was reflected in the way the participants were sitting in rapt attention.
“A walk is controlled falling.”
Vaibhav began Module 2 by explaining the basic dynamics of a frontal walk. “Babies have no control over their limbs and keep falling. Once they learn to control falling, they learn to walk.” Using drawings of skeletal structures, he illustrated the twists and turns the body goes through while walking, the changes in volume that the body experiences, the movement of the head and the torso and so on. The same up and down bounce that you notice when you observe a walk sideways is seen when you view it from the front. (continued…)
RamSinghKumaresh Masterclass: Module 3
The third and concluding module of RamSinghKumaresh’s Animation Masterclass began with a forty-five minute session of live sketching. A volunteer stood on stage, changing his pose after every 5 seconds and the participants had to rapidly keep sketching. After sometime, Vaibhav instructed the participants to sketch without looking down at the paper. The idea is to train the brain - when you look at the page and draw, your left brain immediately begins to judge and, more often, criticize the drawing, so you end up focusing on beautifying the drawing. Instead, what you should actually be doing is trying to capture the form and the structure of the model. When you don’t look at the paper, your brain focuses on just capturing the lines - somewhat like a plotter would do. The aim is to capture the attitude of the pose.
“Scribble - Scribble - Throw Away!”
Sketching is a very important exercise. It trains the brain to really SEE and the hands to DRAW what the brain sees. Your observation skills improve. As you keep sketching, the brain begins to store the data, so that when you draw from memory, the brain retrieves this data. Vaibhav reiterated that what was being done here was just a warm up, and that too a brief one. When sketching, one must take it seriously - focus, not fool around, joke or get distracted. 10 minutes isn’t enough to sketch. One must practise for at least one hour daily. Another point he made was to not get too attached to the drawings. Use them for practise. He called it “Scribble - Scribble - Throw away!” (Continued…)
Kaka’s Clayground: Review
Event: Kaka’s Clayground - An interactive session with Dhimant Vyas
Organised by: The Animation Society of India (TASI)
Date: 2nd May, 2010
Venue: Pelicula Auditorium, Whistling Woods International, Mumbai
image courtesy: Dhimant Vyas & Aardman Studios
Dhimant Vyas aka Kaka is a much-loved veteran of animation and his sessions always guarantee a full house. So on Sunday, the 2nd of May, when the Pelicula Auditorium at Whistling Woods International, Mumbai was temporarily transformed into Kaka’s Clayground for an afternoon of fun, films and learning, the 300 strong audience got much more than they bargained for.
In a span of 5 hours, Dhimant took everyone on a tour of Aardman Studios, Bristol, Bath and Stone Henge, with Shaun the Sheep, Purple, Brown, Wallace and Gromit for company. The audience not only got a peek behind the scenes of many Aardman films but also into the rich culture of Bristol, with its assorted festivals - of kites, balloons, boats and much more! And of course, they learned about ‘clay animation’, ’stop motion’ and ‘go motion’.
TASI’s Joint Secretary Vaibhav Kumaresh, an accomplished animator himself, began the session by introducing Dhimant to the audience for the benefit of those who don’t know him (Although I doubt that there was any such person in the crowd). He promised the audience a ‘hot’ session, hinting at the popularity of the event and simultaneously lamenting the fact that the venue had a scheduled power cut. Luckily for the audience, eventually it was only the the session that was hot.
image courtesy: The Animation Society of India (TASI)
Having previously worked with the Aardman Studio team on ‘Creature Comforts’, Dhimant had been specially invited to work on the new episodes of Shaun the Sheep (currently being aired on Nickelodeon in India), which is how he found himself spending close to a year in Bristol, UK, at the Aardman Studio, working right from pre-production stage to animation.
Dhimant began by screening a few short clips, requesting the audience to refrain from taking any photos or videos as it was all copyrighted material. The agenda was to share his experience of working on two clay-animation TV series at Aardman Studios - ‘Shaun the Sheep’ and ‘Purple and Brown’.
image courtesy: Dhimant Vyas & Aardman Studios
After screening an episode of Shaun the Sheep, rather than just talk about how the films were made, Kaka chose to elucidate through photographs. This part was highly interactive with Kaka explaining in great detail the process of animating for Shaun the Sheep, the audience throwing a constant barrage of questions his way and Dhimant answering each one patiently.
He explained a new technique that he learned and used for the first time - Go Motion. It is similar to Stop-motion, where the objects are moved and captured frame by frame, but in the case of Go-motion, while the frame is being exposed, the background or certain elements on the set are moved, thus creating an illusion of rapid movement. E.g. The road and the bushes in certain scenes were animated using the Go-motion technique while the characters in the foreground were simultaneously being animated in Stop-motion. While the go-motion was being done on ‘ones’, the stop-motion was being done on ‘twos’.
The set for Shaun the Sheep was divided into 16 parts, besides which some sets were created and dismantled as and when required. Dhimant remembered one particular set where the glass window in one of the model-buildings was reflecting his face in many frames. They had to modify the problem part and Dhimant had to crouch each time they exposed a frame. The sets were large and sturdy, with metal reinforcement underneath facilitating the animators to actually walk over the models, some of which were expansive.
image courtesy: Dhimant Vyas & Aardman Studios
‘Shaun the Sheep’ had 3 directors, and multiple animators, each one assigned with assistants to help him or her. There are production coordinators, art directors, model-makers, set-designers, riggers, cinematographers, runners and a whole big team handling various responsibilities.
Dhimant showed visuals to explain the construction of the various character models, the mechanical rigs to show flying/jumping movements, props which were only partially constructed (on the camera-facing side only) to enable the animator to move parts freely from the other side. Few scenes were shot against blue or green screens or on glass surfaces. Most character models were created partly with clay and partly with stiffer silicone. The miniature props (everything from furniture to vegetables to houses and trees) were constructed from clay, wax, fiber glass, wood etc. The mouths of most characters were created using replacement parts to facilitate lip-syncing to dialogue. For this particular shoot, more silicone rubber was used than plasticine because it is more durable. The props are all made in-house at Aardman’s moulding facility and not outsourced because of copyright issues. The backdrops were either stretched canvas or cut-outs and matt paintings.
image courtesy: Dhimant Vyas & Aardman Studios
While watching the final film, we tend to forget the effort that goes into making stop-motion films. The maximum animation that can be achieved in a single day is 6-8 seconds but because of the complex nature of the shots, on many days only 2-3 seconds could be completed. All the hard work resulted in back problems for Dhimant and in some photos, one could see him animating while wearing a back support belt around his waist. Reshooting was a luxury they couldn’t afford because there was no time for it, so the animators had to constantly keep checking each shot.
Sometimes there are unexpected problems - like when the prop-makers created the wheels for the car without taking into consideration the fact that the wheels had to move in the scene and the result was that the motion wasn’t smooth and the wheels had to be remade.
The session was peppered with constant questions from the audience.
Q. “How do you control the light so as to avoid flicker?”
A. - “The lighting in the room you shoot in must be completely under your control. Block all natural light by covering the windows with black paper/cloth. Use a stabiliser/UPS to prevent lights from flickering. Ideally shoot at night when there are lesser chances of people switching lights on and off repeatedly.”
Q. ” Does Aardman Studios use proprietary software to capture the frames?”
A. - ” The software - Stopmotion Pro is used at Aardman, as it has a lot of useful features including onion-skinning, rig-remover, live-action syncing etc. They do interact closely with the folks who create the software.”
Next came “Purple and Brown”, and the film clips that Dhimant screened left the audience wondering how the animators had achieved such impressive squash and stretch in a medium like clay-animation. Dhimant revealed some of the tricks using photographs of the models and the animation process. Although replacement models were used most of the time, the animators still had to keep moulding and reshaping the models. There was no armature inside the models - they were completely made of plasticine. In one scene the characters wore little glass helmets and again they were faced with the problem of reflections. The glass and the plasticine kept collecting dust and finger prints so they had to constantly keep cleaning the surfaces. The mouth and lips of the characters were made on the fly so lots of spare parts were required. The model-makers are always at hand to fix any broken or deformed models.
Kaka then showed complete storyboards that were created for 2 episodes of Shaun the Sheep. The painstaking detail in each of them was astounding and bears testimony to the amount of effort goes into the making of each episode. Time flew as the audience got to see several episodes of Shaun the Sheep.
image courtesy: Dhimant Vyas & Aardman Studios
The audience was begging for more and Dhimant happily obliged by screening the Oscar-nominated “A Matter of Loaf and Death”. He also showed a few segments from the American edition of “Creature Comforts” - which he too had worked on during his first stint at Aardman Studio.
Dhimant showed photos of the armatures of the characters from “Creature Comforts” to give everyone an idea of the construction and the materials used. He also shared the slug-sheets used to mark the breakdown of dialogue and lip movements.
Some more Q&A followed.
Q. “How do you show liquids?”
A. “A variety of materials is used to show liquids - for instance the coffee in “A Matter of Loaf and Death” was made using clay mixed with jelly. Other materials include - KY Jelly, Petroleum Jelly (vaseline), White transparent plastic and Glue-gun drops.”
Q. “How does one learn timing for animation?”
A. ” Observation. And practice. Lots of it. Watch any good actor or actress from a live-action film by pausing and viewing them frame-by-frame. You will notice subtle movements and actions that you would otherwise miss. Make a mental note and use it when you animate.”
Responding to another audience question about the importance of the story in Aardman’s productions - Dhimant shared that at Aardman Studios, everyone is invited to contribute stories. Everyone from Nick Park to the peon can submit a story. A team then brainstorms on the selected story and further tweaks are made during the story-boarding process. The final word, though, belongs to the client - the company that has commissioned the film/series.
On Vaibhav’s request, Dhimant then showed a hand-drawn animation film “Raag Malhar”, which he had made few years ago - it was a brilliant example of timing in animation. He also stressed that as an animator, you never stop learning - he was learning something every day on the sets at Aardman.
The session ended on an inspiring note. Dhimant shared beautiful photographs from his stay in UK - Bristol, Bath, Scotland and even the glorious Stone Henge. Bristol is a city known for its festivals and the audience was given a glimpse into the Kite festival, Balloon festival, Harbour festival as well as an air show. Dhimant also showed pictures of the city of Bristol as seen from a helicopter, the Bristol Zoo and the brilliant wall graffiti across Bristol.
By doing so, Kaka revealed a little secret - the secret of his creativity. A keen interest in everything around, in arts, in people, in places. Travelling, observing and capturing in photographs and in his memory, every visual that he sees and storing it in his sponge-like mind, to be used sometime in the future, expressed through his art and in his animation. I do hope that these little pearls of wisdom were collected by those who were lucky enough to have the opportunity to play on Kaka’s Clayground. I sure did.
The TASI Team and volunteers - image courtesy: The Animation Society of India (TASI)
RamSinghKumaresh Masterclass Module 2 announced
After the successful first module of RamSinghKumaresh’s Masterclass, the second module will now be held on 8th May and registrations have been opened. Here are the details:
Module II
- StoryTelling II
- Fundamentals of Movement II
- Anatomy for Visual Development II
Date: May 8th, 2010
Time: 10am to 5pm
Venue: Karma Hall, Whistling Woods International, Film City, Goregaon (East), Mumbai
To register, visit: www.ramsinghkumaresh.com
AllAboutAnimation.com interviewed Vivek Ram, Ranjit Singh & Vaibhav Kumaresh just before their debut session - read it here.
Sadly, I missed the first module held on 24th April due to unavoidable circumstances but our friends at CGTantra have a detailed report here.
AAA will be present at the second module so you can expect a detailed report for sure.
Here is a little bit of information about the Masterclass - It aims to bridge the gap between Animation Training and Education and covers the following:
StoryTelling
Discussion on the basic building blocks of a story. How do you take an idea that sounds good, and actually construct a meaningful and captivating story out of it? A look at some interesting animated short films across various mediums with interactive discussions on their use of specific techniques to aid the storytelling process. Understanding different genres of film and the advantages of animation as a medium of expression. We will simplify story construction by discussing successful film plots and why they worked and in simple terms understand how to translate ideas into visual scripts for animation.
Fundamentals of Movement
Introducing the participants to the fundamentals of movement in animation. Whatever be the medium of animation, the fundamentals of movement remain the same. Covering the basic principles like stretch, squash, timing, spacing, anticipation, follow through and much more, the importance of each of these in creating convincing animation will be illustrated. Live demonstrations, homework and exercises for the participants as well as review and analysis of their work.
Anatomy for Visual Development
A study of the various anatomical structures in the human body in detail, and how each is translated into believable structures that make up the creatures and characters that we see on screen today. Emphasis will be given on those structures that are essential for an artist to understand balance and rhythm in characters created for both a realistic as well as a toony visual.There will be assignments so that the audience has a chance for a complete hands-on experience on the subject.
Kaka’s Clayground: A session with Dhimant Vyas
Dhimant Vyas is back! After a year long stint in the UK at the Aardman Studio, where he had been specially invited to work on the series “Shaun the Sheep”, Dhimant is now back in India. The Animation Society of India has organised a session with Dhimant on the 2nd of May at the Pelicula Auditorium @ Whistling Woods International in Goregaon. Dhimant will be showcasing the work done on “Shaun the Sheep” and “Purple and Brown”.
Date: 2nd May 2010
Time: 1 pm to 6 pm
Venue: Pelicula Auditorium, Whistling Woods International, Film City, Goregaon East, Mumbai
If you haven’t registered as yet, do so right away as seats are limited. Visit www.tasionline.org to for registration details.
Meet RamSinghKumaresh
In April 2010 this year, the Indian animation fraternity received some surprising but welcome news. Vivek Ram, Ranjit (Tony) Singh and Vaibhav Kumaresh announced their collaborative venture - RamSinghKumaresh. For our knowledge-starved industry, it was indeed heartening to see experienced professionals taking the extra step towards animation education. Most ’sessions’ and ‘masterclasses’ have, until now, been the domain of educational institutes and have therefore been limited to their own students, with the exception of the ones organised by The Animation Society of India, the autonomous and voluntary organisation that has been doing this for a decade now. It is no surprise then, that one of the brains behind TASI also happens to be the catalyst behind RamSinghKumaresh.
So here is the scoop, directly from the horses’ mouth, as I caught up with RamSinghKumaresh for an exclusive interview.
Q. Who is the mastermind behind this? Ram, Singh or Kumaresh?
RAM: That would be the Singh. We were all thinking about this over a long period on a very individual level, but it was Tonyji who first threw the idea in the air as to “Why not do this together and provide much more value than all of us are individually capable of?” And we unanimously voted for Awesome!
SINGH: This was something waiting to happen I guess. Kumaresh and me had been toying with the idea of doing something concrete and in a sustainable manner for quite some time, I just happened to jump start the process. I thought of roping in Ram, since I had a feeling about his mindset, we had a joint meeting and figured out that my hunch was right. The three of us share the same passion, commitment and philosophy towards animation education, so it really became a no-brainer. This may have been one person’s idea and that to us is unimportant, it is our collective commitment that’s got us excited.
KUMARESH: It was Tonyji who did the initial prodding! We jumped in with all the happiness! And once we were all in, we collectively structured this plan piece by piece and gave birth to RamSinghKumaresh: The Animation Masterclass!
