All Entries in the "Recommended" Category
Three Cheers for ‘Yama and Moo’
After blog upon blog of cribbing about the absolute crap coming out of Indian animation studios, here is something that will bring a smile to your lips and make your chest swell with pride. A short CG animated film conceived, produced and executed by a young team of Indian animators. A brilliant piece of art, it is the result of a collaboration between Void Films and Frameboxx Incubation Center. Don’t take my word for it. See it for yourself and send your feedback. Enjoy!!
TASI’s Full Day Model Making Workshop with Vaibhav Studios
TASI Model Making Workshop
TASI is organizing a full day Model Animation Workshop conducted by none other than all-time-favourite Vaibhav Kumaresh of Vaibhav Studios. It will begin with the screening of some puppet animation film clips. After that, the process of stop motion/puppet/clay animation will be demonstrated live. This will include techniques like displacement as well as replacement animation. Topics like lip sync and character performance will also be touched upon. The participants will be guided to create their own wire frame armatures for stop motion.
The workshop will demonstrate the following:
1. Translating a 2d character design into an armature diagram
2. Building the armature
3. Shoot setup
4. Action planning
5. Lip sync with replacement lips
6. Stop motion shoot and playback
7. Q&A with the audience
Date: 22nd March, 2009
Time: 10 am to 6 pm
Venue: P C Saxena Auditorium, IIT Powai, Mumbai
Fees (includes the cost of materials for armature creation):
Students - Rs.300/-
Professionals - Rs.500/-
TASI Members - Rs.200/-
ONLY 100 SEATS!
To register, contact the following TASI committee members:
Devang - 9870006181
Devika - 9821319058
REMEMBER: There is no online registration for this workshop and registration is against full payment only. Registrations close on 19th March.
Learning from Waltz With Bashir
Waltz with Bashir
Well, from Ari Folman, the creator of this compelling animated documentary, actually. An interview with Marshall Fine of the Huffington Post, gives us a glimpse into the mind of writer/director Ari Folman who made this film against all odds and gained worldwide success. He has almost philosophical views on war, forgiveness and politics but those have no place here on an animation blog. What I really want to share here are 5 invaluable lessons gleaned from the interview with this unconventional film-maker. I hope our aspiring animators and film-makers who want to make their own films will take these lessons to heart.
Lesson No. 1: It is all in the story-telling
(from the interview) …A very personal look at the Israel-Lebanon war of 1982, Waltz with Bashir follows Folman as he tracks down old friends and fellow veterans of the Israeli Army and asks them to share their memories of the conflict. Whenever he tries to remember it, he draws a blank - and so he goes to his friends to help refresh his memory. The result is an exercise in recall that melts from memory to dream to hallucination - ending in a shocking moment of reality when the film suddenly moves from animation to archival footage of the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Muslims by Lebanese Christian forces, in retaliation for the assassination of president-elect Bashir Gemayel…With a controversial but factual story about war combined with real, archival footage, who would have thought the film would catch the fancy of people across the world? A dark, disturbing subject like war has been tackled innumerable times before so what sets apart this film? The answer lies in the telling of the story. Can you create interest in the minds of the audience? Can you get them involved in the lives of your characters? Can you hook them, grip them, enchant them, make them suspend disbelief and lose themselves in your story? THAT is the power of story-telling, no matter what the subject is.
Lesson No. 2: Believe. In yourself. In your story. In the medium.
(from the interview) …But, as Folman says, a nonfiction retelling that relied on archival footage would have been lumped in with all the other talking-head political documentaries that come and go - many of them never being released, most going unseen in the U.S. - every year. Animation made it stand out - and helped Folman find a way to exploit the visual aspects of what is essentially an oral history. “Animation was the only way to do it,” he says. “I imagined it as an animated film. I always knew it would be. I had no other choice. It’s a story about the subconscious, about fear and death, war horrors, drugs - the only way to include all of that was animation.” Inevitably, he faced questions: Is it true? Is it real? Which raised other questions: Did animation undermine its connection to reality - or enhance it? “The hardest part was convincing people that it could be done,” Folman say…A lot of people questioned Folman’s decision to make a film on this subject. They felt his choice of medium was inappropriate as well. He did not have a background in animation either. But he believed. In the story he had to narrate, in the medium of ‘animated-documentary’ and most of all, in himself. The strength of his conviction ensured that the film got made.
Lesson No. 3: Never give up. Keep trying.
(from the interview) …Even then, the film had to be made piecemeal. Folman started with three minutes, then started pitching. It took him four years to get the money to finish the movie. “I pitched it three and a half years ago in Toronto,” he says. “I had a three-minute scene that I showed to 40 people - and 38 of them said, ‘Why animated?’ They didn’t want it. “You have to convince a lot of people. I went to a lot of parties. It was a complicated four years. I never stopped. I did three minutes, then went to Toronto and raised money. Then I did 20 minutes, then I stopped and raised more money. Then I did 40 minutes. If you stop, you get stuck and lose your team and it gets more complicated.”…The task was daunting. The film was almost experimental and most people had rejected his pitch. Yet he went on undeterred. He not only worked on the film himself, he also went around trying to raise funds. He did everything possible to ensure the film was completed. He had a vision and a task. He went all out to make it a reality, not giving up even once.
Lesson No. 4: Innovate
(from the interview) …A TV writer (including for the Israeli version of In Therapy) and director, Folman had never worked with animation before. And with minimal funding for his idea, he had to come up with his own approach. “We invented the animation style,” he says. “Basically it is cut-out animation. We did it ourselves because of the very low budget we had.”…Sure, there were problems. Unforeseen ones as well as expected ones. With a budget that was limited, Ari and his team reiterated the proverb - Necessity is the mother of invention. When you have a goal, you cannot let anything stop you from achieving it. Try with whatever is within your means but also push the limit whenever you can. Experiment, innovate, turn your shortcomings into advantages, push the envelope.
Lesson No. 5: Do it for YOURSELF
(from the interview) …As he worked on it, Folman felt he was making something special - but what filmmaker doesn’t? Even then, though he was excited when the film was accepted at Cannes, he had no sense of the way it would be received. “We were clueless about its impact until we came to Cannes,” he says. “We knew nothing. We were working in a small lab on the outskirts of Tel Aviv and we were having fun. I knew when it was done it would be a great movie. All along, I was very confident. I had solved a lot of the problems artistically and financially. But I was surprised at the fight for the film after the screening. Really, we didn’t know what we were doing. I believe you never do as filmmakers.”…Folman did not make this film to prove a point. He did not make it to win accolades for the animation. He had a story that he wanted to narrate which he wanted to take to people across the world. He was not thinking of audiences or jury when he was making the film. He made it the way it best enhanced the story. He was focussed on the task at hand and gave it his best. That is something most of us do not do. We lose track thinking of the grand prize awaiting us at the finishing line. Do not make the film because it is your class lesson, or project, or perhaps your job. Do not do it for the ‘money’ or ‘awards’. Do it for your own sake - because you have a story that deserves to be told in the best possible manner.
I will leave you with the trailer of Waltz with Bashir and a parting thought. There is so much to learn from the experiences of others. Our animation/filmmaking students sometimes suffer because they do not have good teachers at their schools and institutes, but what stops them from learning outside the classroom?
“Making of a Showreel” - Today in Mumbai
This informative session will begin in a few hours from now at the Rangsharda Auditorium in Bandra Reclamation, Mumbai. AAA will carry the complete coverage in tomorrow’s blogpost.
Anifest India 2008… are you coming?
The preparations have been hectic. A lot of hard work has gone into organizing this year’s Anifest India, as always! With an expected turnout of over 1500 people, this long weekend is going to be one hell of a big party, with lots to do, lots to learn and many many people to meet. I’m going to be there - to participate and also as one of the committee members of TASI. And I do hope many of you join us. For details, do visit the TASI website. I haven’t had a chance to update the AAA blog because I have been handling the responsiblity of maintaining and updating the TASI website as well. I will be covering the event on all 3 days - 15th to 17th Aug. But it will be a lot more interesting to attend it rather than just read about it later.
So be there… Or be square! 
Get Ready For ANIFEST INDIA 2008!!
IT’S BACK!!!
TASI’s much awaited ANIFEST INDIA 2008 will be held this year on August 15th, 16th and 17th at IDC, IIT Powai in Mumbai.
They have already announced the ‘Call For Entries’ for the Viewers’ Choice Awards and this time there is an added category too.
1. Short Films : Students
2. Short Films : Professional
3. Advertising Commercials
The last date for submitting your entries is 15th July, 2008.
Lots of exciting stuff is being planned and with the beautiful IIT campus as the backdrop, there will be many interactive and hands-on workshops this year.
“Dekh Bhai Dekh” …worth a dekko!
Learning animation is not just about learning how to use the software. Art, literature, history, story-telling, film-making, music, acting… many different things go into it. You also need to watch a lot of good films to be able to create great films. That is what the students of NID, India’s premier animation school, do. But they don’t just stop at watching the inspiring films, they go one step ahead. They share them!
So here is a very nice effort by a bunch of NIDians - a blog where various contributors upload links to some amazing short films from across the world. Smit Shah and Rohit Iyer kick-started the film-recommendation network and were later joined by a lot of their peers. See the blog - DEKH BHAI DEKH - subscribe to it if you like and then come back and read this wacky interview with the duo that started it all!
AAA: How did you come upon the idea to create a blog like this? What was the ‘inspiration’ or thought behind it?
SMIT: All through my stay at NID, I came across a lot of good short films, animation and otherwise which we used to share amongst each others. But by November last year I realised there were a lot of people who had left NID, and we couldnt keep up with exchanging these films. So to share these inspirations I started a mailing list which had a lot of NIDians as well as non NIDians. Anyone who was interested could ask for an invitation to the mailing list, and a lot of people wanted the archives of those good films. The idea was simple, growing into a ‘one good animation a day in your inbox’. It was also to provide as much information about the film maker and the production houses. We try to look for more information about the film on the net and include it as well. It wasnt until mid jan that this mailing list was converted to a blog, and what an appropriate name Rohit came up with.
ROHIT: I’m sure Smit must have started it out of boredom… or to show off (he likes doing that!). He started sending everyone these mails and he added me to the list. Me… I’m like efficiency - as cool as it was to have the links in my inbox every day, I got kind of fed up of being linked to a trazillion different video sites. So I figured the best way to do this is to have a blog where we could embed the videos and group members could sign up and post new videos and an update would be sent to subscribers’ inbox through a feed. This really helps because you can look at the videos at a glance and not sift through lots of emails to find something.
So we also invited all the people in the mailing list to be part of the blog, so anyone can sign in and post stuff. There was a concern about what’s the point in having a blog like this when there are so many other such blogs/sites online already. So after some thought, we kind of figured that these are videos recommended by people we KNOW and not just random shorts. The idea behind posting on the blog is that we want to share what WE like and express our tastes and discoveries through this, as opposed to creating some sort of archive.
The name “Dekh Bhai Dekh” came about because when creating the blog, I had to give it a name and I preferred something in Hindi. Trivia: Dekh Bhai Dekh is the name of an old TV show from nineties starring Shekhar Suman, which used to air on Sony Entertainment Television!
TASI Upcoming Session on 31st May: Pre-production for Animation
On Saturday, 31st May, 2008 at the P C Saxena Auditorium in IIT Powai, Mumbai, TASI is holding session on Pre-production for Animation.
Three speakers will share their recent work and elucidate on the entire process of conceptualizing and planning up untill the actual production begins.
Santosh Sawant - Creative Director, Phoebus Creations, Mumbai
Uttam Pal - Independent Animator & Film-maker, Mumbai
Rudra Matsa - Founder & CEO, Panel Animation Studios, Hyderabad
With examples from their own films, the speakers will take you through the process from concept to the final blue-print. Phases discussed will include intellectual property (IP) creation, story, script, storyboarding, animatics, character and environment design, colour keys, sound design and much more!
Visit the TASI website for more information.
