All Entries Tagged With: "Inspiring"
Waiting for Arjun…
I was in a suburban movie theatre 2 nights ago watching “A Wednesday” when they screened the trailer of UTV’s upcoming release - Arjuna, The Warrior Prince. Not that I hadn’t seen it before (thanks to YouTube!!) but experiencing it on a big screen was a whole new experience. I was amazed. This is an Indian big-budget production that we can be proud of. If the trailer is anything to go by ( and they can be misleading some times) the quality is top-notch. (See the YouTube sneak-peek at the end of the article)
Until now the only truly ‘artistic’ animated films from India that I had seen were either independent films or student films from institutes such as NID and IDC (IIT). But large scale productions have always fallen short at some level. Maybe it was the lack of vision, time, patience, knowledge or perhaps all of these. It can’t be budgetary constraints - an individual superstar’s fees for a single Bollywood movie can fund an entire animated film! But Arnab Chaudhuri, the man at the helm of Arjun, surely knows what he is doing. An alumnus of the National Institute of Design and ex-Turner Creative Director, he seems to have what it takes to do justice to the story and the medium.
The animation style appears to be a combination of 2D and 3D - the final look and feel is of 2D animation but the fabric, the water and the movements of the characters are distinctly 3D. The film is reminiscent of Disney’s Prince of Egypt while Arjun could easily be the long-lost brother of Tarzan! The script writers seem to have taken a few liberties with the story but that is what great story-telling is about; retelling an age-old tale and embellishing it with one’s own visual interpretation.
This is the second Indian animated film that holds a lot of promise, after Yash Raj Film’s Roadside Romeo, which is an out and out 3D animated feature. I am looking forward to both of them and so is the entire Indian animation community. The Indian audiences have got a raw deal from some haughty, talent-less so-called animation film makers - a case in point being the makers of the recent ‘Icy n Spicy’, who thankfully got the boot from the audience! Roadside Romeo and Arjun should more than make up for it and once and for all dispel the myth that Indian animation lacks talent and vision when it comes to original IP productions. Until the movie releases, enjoy the trailer 
“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!
