Monday, March 4, 2024
Clouds hover, frogs hop and images move. We’ve had two design projects until now—graphic narrative and branding. And here we are with the third one. The big one—Moving Images. Here’s an attempt at documenting the high jinks we’ve been up to in the past week. A great module demands a great team. Needless to say, here’s the roster, the home team:
The team after a hard day’s work. I’m serious. Mostly serious.
The first week has been a lot of work—and a lot of fun. We spent the first couple days consuming content. Good content if I may. Kicked it off with a bunch of Gobelins graduation films. Oh! I almost forgot to mention, we set up our own studio space within one of the studios. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from KL11’s Abhijith Keyaar, it’s that file naming convention is importa—no. Wait. I meant to write about creating your own space to work—and optimising it to befit your needs. This was ours:
Our studio space inside Studio 108 in the academic block.
Yes, origami somehow became this morning ritual/group activity we’d all indulge in. I wonder if these activities and objects directed our initial plans for the film—or was it the other way around? After a bunch of drawing sessions and instances of us sitting down (with utmost discipline) to discuss ideas, the plan was clear: we’re going back. No, not to our rooms as we do when we’ve had just enough of classes. We were going back to our respective childhoods, reminiscing memories of people young and old, stories of places that persist and the ones that got washed away with time. And there was one connective tissue binding all these stories together: uncles and candies. Not just any candies. Not the candies that we’d see in a departmental store (at least not most departmental stores). These candies were the ones we’d receive from older people. Indian candies! Or at least Indian-looking candies. The prime example being Lemonchoos. Lemonchoos was the candy that looked like an orange slice. I remember one of my Nanas giving it to me when I’d visit him, fittingly earning the name “Toffee waale Nana”. After discussing multiple stories, several such people and instances we had encountered, another idea popped up: the general yet distinct allure of all things, every thing during childhood.
People seem taller, objects seem bigger, colours seem more vivid, buildings seem to be touching the heavens above. It was clear, we wanted to capture that very allure of childhood. Keeping these thoughts in mind, we doubled down on our story. To put it simply, the story was about a kid striking an unlikely friendship with an old man in his neighbourhood over a shared interest in candies. No, we’re not talking about Willy Wonka. The associations are obvious and we acknowledged it, making sure we set ourselves apart. Besides, all the stories we grew up reading and hearing—be it Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, or Alice in Wonderland—all spoke in English, acted English, and dare I say, felt somewhat English (as they would and perhaps should, by nature). Our old man wasn’t going to sound, feel, or look like any of those characters that we’ve loved so much. However, I will mention that he might be acquainted with some of them, and perhaps be friends with some of them.
Some artists became preliminary yet very strong inspiration in the beginning—Victoria Vincent (vewn), Quentin Blake, Aritra Kundu (arikundu) and then some.
Spending the weekend watching films like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and The BFG(2016), we’re about to lock the first draft of the script. Aashna, Aadhi, and Janhavi are wrapping up with it as we speak. We aim to finalize the script by tonight itself, aiming to start full-fledged production by early next week. Considering we have a little over 8 weeks in total (one down, one as an interim break that we do not wish to touch work in), we’d like to spend at least 4 weeks figuring out, fidgeting with, and realising a proper production workflow. In other words: animating will take a sh*t ton of time—and we sure hope to dedicate all that time.
Signing off, I’d like to mention how Janhavi has graciously promised to sponsor ice-cream for the next 8 weeks:
Aashna couldn’t have ice-cream, she was sick.
Friday, March 8, 2024
Here we are, at the end of week 2! While week 1 was largely about story ideas, missing and catching story beats and constructing a narrative we were all passionate of throughout the entirety of this project—and proud of after it was over, week 2 has mostly been about realising that narrative and building a collective visualisation of the ideas we’ve all had hovering up in our minds all this time.
Dividing ourselves into teams of two, Gautam and I began working on character design while Aashna, Ayushi and Janhavi began ideating on the storyboards. While work moved steadily in those avenues, Aadhi sat down to figure out the path ahead: production methods and processes. He’s been hard at work to ensure that we use the same software, same brush sets with the same brush sizes and opacity to maintain consistency throughout the project.