By Zeenia Boatwala and Nicole Fernandes
Like every year, Anifest India saw a congregation of the best minds in the Indian Animation, VFX and Comics Industry sharing their wealth of knowledge with the young aspirants and enthusiasts, this year as well. Here is a glimpse into some of the sessions:
Making of Life of Pi by Rhythm and Hues India team, the opening session of the fest, enthralled the attendees with hours of visual breakdowns of tricky VFX sequences. Seshaprasad A. R, Head of Digital Production at Rhythm & Hues Studios (Asia) along with his team shared Ang Lee’s vision for the movie and discussed the hard core VFX areas including creation of CG animals, CG Ocean, CG Lifeboat, Sea Extensions, CG Sky. He pointed out that with Life of Pi, Ang Lee’s vision was to create art and give audiences a visual experience.
The CGI tiger came out so well that Ang Lee didn’t believe it was CGI shared the R & H team. The team took the audience through the technical challenges of creating photo realistic animals, references used for creating several sequences, the look and development process for the tiger, how difficult it was to animate the paws of the tiger along with cracking shots where interaction of the CGI tiger had to be shown with the boat. They shared that out of the 446 VFX shots that R&H worked on, the shot where Pi trains the tiger in boat, made Ang Lee truly believe in Indian Animation.
The comic enthusiasts had a great time too when they got a chance to interact with Anuja Thirani of Campfire Graphic Novels and Prateek Thomas of Manta Ray Comics. Anuja Thirani shared that Camp Fire Graphic Novels dedicatedly creates graphic novels and shared the various type of stories they bring out in the graphic novel medium. Pratheek Thomas, Founder, Manta Ray Comics, shed some light on the presentation of stories in the black and white comic medium (a style that Manta Ray widely uses) as compared to colored pictures as the former is more cost effective. This comic venture (Manta Ray) is funded by a group of friends and there’s no specific work place called an office for them but instead comic ideas come up during interaction between people on social networking sites. Some of Manta Ray Comics’ titles include Motherland, the Small picture and Mixtape.
The much awaited making of the movie ‘Paths of Hate’ by Platigue Films was presented by Director Damein Neow who took the audience behind scenes of this short. Damein shared that the concept of ‘Paths of Hate’ stemmed from his interest in Aviation. Showcasing the breakdowns of crucial sequences, Damein spoke about the challenges of creating cloud sets and shared that the graphic novel ‘Universal War’ was the motivating element for him in bringing out this short.
Day 2 of the fest saw 500 attendees and opened with a treat for sketching lovers by Vaibhav Kumaresh- Founder of Vaibhav Studios, Chetan Sharma- Founder Animagic and Dhimant Vyas, who together conducted the live mass sketching workshop. The experts decided on making use of live characters for this workshop and told the attendees to create rapid anatomy sketches within 5, 10 and 60 seconds and kept sharing the tips and tricks on making a good sketch. Explanation on the laws of basic sketch composition in a frame, the importance of silhouettes, finding out a story component in poses, line of action, sources of light to be considered while drawing kept the audience gripped throughout the workshop. Dhimant Vyas on the other hand, prepared clay models and emphasized on the fact that your model should look perfect from all the angles. The main highlight of this session was when the experts motivated the attendees to sketch at a stretch without looking at their sketch paper.
You can call the next session as the most awaited one where Prosenjit Ganguly, dearly known as “PJ” was on his toes to shed light on healthy animation education. His talk focused on different steps of the learning process right from childhood and what does it take to create fun ideas for movies. Stressing on the early days of learning, he pointed out the fact that each of us have learnt the poems without knowing the meaning and purpose of it and never questioned why?
A series of opinions and solutions on the animation content that would impress the broadcasters came up at the panel discussion on ‘What content do the TV Channels want? Moderated by Vaibhav Kumaresh, the panel was graced by Krishna Desai- Turner, Uttam Pal Singh- Cartoon Network India, Anu Sikka- Nick India and Arnab Chaudhri-Independent Professional. Vaibhav opened the discussion by asking the experts about their favorite TV shows and why they are favorites. The thoughts shared in the session stressed on the need of coming up with good concepts, stories and characters while keeping the targeted audience in mind.
Also, the panelists pointed out that if you are to create animated content, you should understand the content expectations by watching the mix of shows already airing on the channels. Statistics of Indian animation content was also unveiled wherein Cartoon Network India airs 15-18 % of Indian content whereas Pogo airs 60-70%. The key differences between acquisitions, co-productions and original content were also brought into picture and revealed that while pitching your animated story, you should be carrying an episode of it.
And finally, Adam Lee, the Digital Artist at Lucas film,Singapore, showcased the making of visual effects in the movie ‘Pacific Rim’ by explaining the content, behind the scenes, artwork, characters, Kaiju reference, damage effects, animation angles, destruction, underwater sequences, resolutions etc.
