It was a Sunday well spent for the 200+ crowd of artists, professionals and students who attended the CGTantra 3rd Anniversary celebrations at Whistling Woods International on 2nd December in Mumbai. Some of India's best exponents and 'masters of their craft' from development, pre production, cinematography as well as the CG process shared their insights and expertise with the audience through a series of case studies, demos and Master classes. Kudos to the entire CGTantra team for putting up an enriching event!

The celebrations also included live skits scripted and acted out by artists at the event itself as well as the Awards for various CGTantra Challenges including the Game Art Design contest in association with AIGA. The Award winners received their prizes at the hands of none other than 'SHOWMAN' Subhash Ghai himself who displayed his affinity to the CG community by being there for the event.

Amongst the highlights of the day were the show and tell sessions where Modeling Guru Vivek Ram shared with the audience the making of Merman Elite including the various iterations and the thought process that went into every decision made while developing the character. Equally impressive was the show and tell session conducted by Abhishek Singh where he shared the character design and look development process for Virgin Comics' Ramayana 3392 AD.

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Ace Cinematographer Rajen Kothari's session on Painting with Light drew deep breaths from the artists in the audience most of whom were simply fascinated by the medium of Cinematography and the presentation made by the expert. The case study by the creators of One Fine Friday, NID students Dhanesh and Sayantan too was a great learning experience as they shared the entire documentation and 'making of' videos of their film, Stop Motion is indeed such an obtuse and wonderful craft giving technicians and artists the double thrill of live action as well as animation!

Sharing practical tips on 'The making of an animation shot', Visual Computing Labs' Anand Baid and Deepak Ganguly went beyond the technical and also gave some tips related to working as a team and dealing with collaborative creative processes. In his session, Siju Thomas, one of the greatest exponents of digital sculpting in the country gave a live demonstration creating an old man performing Yoga demonstrating the strengths of the ZBrush.

Winners of the CGTantra Challenges who recieved their prizes at the hands of Showman Subhash Ghai included


Sculpting Challenge
1st Prize - Savio Fernandes
2nd Prize - Arnab Roy
3rd Prize - Ankit Garg

Game Art Challenge
1st Prize - Vinay Brahmania
2nd Prize - Uday S

Act it Out Contest
Rishav & Amol

The day began with founders Abhishek Chandra and RK Chand sharing some of the new features that have been added on CGTantra leading on to the show and tell session by Vivek Ram.

Here's sharing some of the insights shared during the sessions

Designing & Modeling Merman Elite: Vivek Ram shares the iterative Process
Talking about the character design of Merman Elite, Vivek shared the thought process and techniques involved at each step.

"I conceived Merman Elite as part of the special task force for the queen. I wanted to create something dangerous, from the deep sea and started designing on the lines of an assassin. Gave him the profile of a Shark but kept a lot of the human aspects alive, including a three way mouth giving an impression of a jaw and hands built around the body to maintain the profile of a shark.

Next, Vivek shared that a lot of times, artists usually start straightaway from ZBrush but since the model had to be riggable he began with Maya. He also pointed out that, "In the beginning while building the model, it is more important to focus on the flow of the topology rather than wondering how it will smooth out.”

Also the stylization was done in a way that Merman looked as fast as he was. The silhouette was very important and it had to look like the shark I wanted it to be.

Stage 3 was when the model was imported into ZBrush. "In ZBrush while sub dividing a lot of your volume goes off so you would want to stet a morph target while you begin. Since I had a lot of geometry in my base mesh. I directly started directly from level 3" shared Vivek. "Also whle exporting be careful how you export or else you will not be able to take it back in Zbrush" he added.

Vivek shared that it was common practice for him to do paintovers even as he modeled, which helped in review and critique. "I wanted to do a complete 3D Illustration complete with backgrounds and not just a T Pose" he pointed out.

The model was taken back to Maya "I was not sure of the composition, all I knew was that I wanted a regal, dramatic pose. I tried a few poses and moved around the hands. Vivek then showed how he did an army of Mermen which looked good but he did not stick with it as it took away the focus from the main character. He finally opted for a simple yet impressive pose.

The model was moved back to ZBrush where the tentacles and scars were added. Went upto subdivision level 6 with around 30,000 polygons. And back to Photoshop for some paintover. TigerShark kind of a feel with very distinct colors defining the front and the back. Did the model at 4K resolution so could be used for printing purposes as well.

The Making of One Fine Friday by NID students team -
Dhaneesh and Sayantan

With its whacky treatment to a grotesque design and story telling, One Fine Friday entertains with chopped heads and blood all over the floor, with its horror and its humor. Made by NID students with expert guidance from Vaibhav Kumaresh, this film can hold its own against any short film made by professionals, making one question the need to categorise films as made by students and those made by professionals, especially in the case where the students are from the National Institute of design.

Presenting its making, NID students Dhaneesh & Sayantan began by sharing the synopsis, "One Fine Friday is about the nightmare of an Indian fisher woman, who impulsively kills a cat who has snatched a fish from her. In the nightmare, the cat returns to avenge himself, and so do all other creatures that she has killed"

The team of Dhaneesh K Jameson, Sayantan Halder, Ravikant Arya and Tanvi Bhatia are the hands and brains behind the film.

It all began with a workshop that was to be conducted by Independent animation filmmaker Vaibhav Kumaresh at NID. These third year students teamed up together to do the honors, apart from other teams. A week before the workshop, Vaibhav had instructed the participants to be ready with a good storyline or atleast a plot for a one minute feature.

Dhaneesh explained, “The constraints we faced here were that we had to have maximum exploration with the media, there had to be a fantastic set, no compromise on lighting. Also we needed to go creative with camera angles and movements. Hence we needed a story which supported all of these, that would entertain the audience all through and be a final complete movie in all senses.”

After a lot of brainstorming of one whole week, the group thought of first taking a character and beginning to weave the story around it. For this the sketchbooks of the team members were screened and Voila! they found an evil cat doodled which was finalized for the grand lead role. It was a unique devil cat with bat wings. Then the story was first written with a butcher being the protagonist, which was later changed to fisherwoman.

How did they build up the story from a vague plot?
“Well we kept asking questions to each other like: Who is the butcher? What is his relation with the cat? Is it his pet?

Does the cat have a girl friend? J How did he happen to kill the cat? What all did the cat do to take revenge on him? and blah blah blah….” explained Sayantan.

Then came in Vaibhav and things developed further under his guidance. Then began the process of sketches of characters, props and environment. With this proper storyboards were made. The students then got to work on the crucial decision on what kind of animation to go about. Clay animation came forth as the best option for their story. It was interesting to hear about the entire journey from plot to film through Satyantan and Dhaneesh. Miniature clay sculptor of the cat and the fisherwoman were made first followed by all the different creatures like fish, mouse, crab etc that are part of the film. In order to make it very realistic they went out to research and clicked pictures of actual fish-market and houses of fishermen and women. Mannerisms and way of fish cutting by fisherwomen too were recorded. “It wasn’t easy to find the miniature props that were required, although we searched a lot in the old parts of the city. So, we had to then make many articles ourselves,” added Dhaneesh.

A lot of experiments and hardships were carried out for the lighting part as shock and horror had to be depicted in the film. The camera positions too had to be decided after lots of experiments, in fact many shots were taken from different angles to choose the best later.

While doing the animation part, a lot of care had to be taken while moving an object for the filming as at times no other object should be moved and at other times all the other objects in the frame had to be moved randomly and very carefully, shared Sayantan.

Finally came the compositing part, where too all the team members sat together and decided on every frame.

Well, it looked like it was fun making the film, but at the same time the students have put in their heart and soul in making the film and it really shows.

Painting with Light - Rajen Kothari
Words can not convey much when the topic is painting with light, nevertheless besides the wonderful imagery that Rajen shared with the audience he did share some of his expertise, and personal insights.

"If Cinema is a toddler, then Photography is a teeny bopper and other art forms are father figures due to their legacy and history," began Rajen who has more than 25 films credits as cinematographer including Bose...The Forgotten Hero.

According to Rajen, still photography is 100 times tougher than Motion Cinematography as the viewer has hours to observe a still image including its inherent beauty and blemishes. Similarly Black & White is much more tougher than color photography.

He also shared that as a Cinematographer he always made it a point to read the several times over before he signed on. "The script should charge you to go ahead" he shared, adding" At the end of the day how you transform the script into visual images is the critical issue."

Within its 8 hour showflow, the CGTantra anniversary packed in quite a punch and each session was immensely enjoyable, keep reading AnimationXpress for more on the other sessions.

Next stops for the anniversary celebrations include Delhi, Bangalore & Chennai...

Stay Tuned!

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