Animation is for sure praising the historians of India!
Currently playing at the stereoscopic 3d theatre of Vivekananda House in Chennai and Ramakrishna Mission in Delhi, this 3D Stereoscopic short film, titled “9/11 – The Awakening” revolves around Swami Vivekananda’s historic speech “Sisters and Brothers of America”, which was delivered at Parliament of Religions in Chicago on September 11th 1893. The movie brings about a series of events including Swami Vivekananda’s trip to the west, his visit to Chicago Expo, his Chicago address and the popularly known story of Sea frog and Well Frog.
This short film of 15 minutes duration was released to mark the 150th Birth Anniversary Celebrations of Swami Vivekananda and was released by Dr.Bhaskar Ramamurthy, Director of IIT Madras. Monastic members of Ramakrishna Math, Chennai and Ramakrishna Mission, Delhi collaborated with GISR (Global Institute for Stereo Vision and Research) team to make this short film.
Speaking to Animationxpress.com’s Zeenia Boatwala about the interesting highlights of 9/11 – The Awakening short film, Br. Arvind of Sri Ramakrishna Math, Chennai, says, “The entire Chicago Expo of 1893 has been re-created based on Chicago Archive Maps along with a virtual setup of the Parliament of Religions stage with an audience of 7000 members. The ship that Vivekananda undertook during his journey to the West has also been re-created with the same realism as modeled in the recent TinTin Movie. The famous story of sea frog and well frog as told by Vivekananda has been depicted with colorful animation along with foley sounds effects to entertain the kids.”
It has taken a total of seven months to complete this short film with 5 Core team members and 15 freelancers involved in the making of this short film. The credits for 9/11 – The Awakening includeDr.C.S.S Bharathy – Animation Director and Stereographer, R. Manikandan – Technical Director with Joseph Selvaraj, the Art Director, Murugan Mohan as the Music Director Ramanathan as the Voice Artist and Kaushik Lakshmi Narasimhan as the MoCap Actor.
Realistic 3D Model of Swami Vivekananda with real skin shaders has been created in this short film and improvised further taking references of photographs of Swami Vivekananda and rendering was executed using an outsourced hosted render farm running 24 hours on 100 nodes for 2 Months.
Br. Arvind adds more, “Only a few Hollywood animation movies like Polar Express and Beowulf have attempted realistic models for living personalities, but for Vivekananda it makes it all the more challenging since 3D body scan cannot be performed (since he is not alive). To create smoother animation for the 3D movie, Motion capture has been performed with an actor playing Vivekananda’s role.”
To know more about the short film, you can log on to, www.vivekananda3d.org. A short movie trailer is available at http://www.vivekanandahouse.org/page/911-awakening-3d-movie-trailer-1215