An Animated Short Film revolving around the Story of a Magician, created as a student project by Reliance AIMS, captures the attention at the FTII National Student’s Film Festival and receives awards for Best film and Best Direction category. This Film Festival was organized by FTII in association with Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) of Kolkata.
In the past, this short film has also received several nominations in recognized award platforms including INFOCOM/ ASSOCHAM EME Awards, ASIFA INDIA AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE, FICCI BAF Awards and has been praised for its Rigging and Animation Techniques.
Keeping in mind that there is a little child in all of us who loves to see magicians and their magical tricks, this 4 minutes and 59 second short film was carried out by 24 students at Reliance AIMS, directed by Rajnikant Arya and Vivek Surve and completely produced by Reliance AIMS.
Expressing on the victory at FTTI, Sathish Narayanan, Academic Director Shares with Animationxpress.com’s Zeenia Boatwala by saying, “Heartfelt thanks! We feel very honored and privileged to receive ‘two awards’! The main objective of our course curriculum is storytelling and film making. Therefore, the students are groomed to deliver a short film. The aim was to make a simple, humorous movie with which all the students can contribute in each and every process and also they could get practical experience with the step by step approach involved in filmmaking.”
This series of awards wouldn’t have been possible without our faculties Vishnu sir, Somesh sir, Vikram Sir, Hari Sir, Rini Madam and Sathish Sir whose immense support and technical guidance helped Spellbound to achieve feat at FTII,” emphasize Rajnikanth and Vivek, Directors of the movie.
According to Sathish, Spellbound is a simple story with lot of scope and challenges from script to DVD and the team feels that they’ve adapted different styles at the beginning of the movie to establish a gala.
It has taken around 5 months for team to complete the short film with the concept, script and the preproduction done under the guidance of Vishnu Salunke, Academic Head and the movie was released on March 10 last year. Initially, the story line of this short film was long and the pace was slow. And, to speed up the film, the faculty guided the students to rework on the script a couple of times to give it a fine tuning.
We ask the creators of the movie more about the story line and the choice of using a Magician as a protagonist for this short film and Rajnikant along with Vivek inform on this by saying, “A magician has this beautiful art to play with our vision and get us hypnotized with his tricks. The things which he makes us believe or creates are a creation from his artistic skills by casting visual spell on us and that leaves us spellbound. We were convinced that the title had to be spellbound from the very beginning and the concept took shape in our mind.”
An added advantage for this team was to not look around for references for the look and feel and character descriptions for the short film and instead they picked Reliance Animation’s animated series ‘Little Krishna’ as the chief reference for creating ‘Spellbound’. The team went through a detailed study of the character Dadhilobha, a monkey character from the series.
Rajnikant and Vivek add more, “The Dadhilobha (monkey) character in Little Krishna got us inspired especially the animation techniques and now the character has become one of the favorites and this motivated us to create animation short film and make monkey character as centre of attention.
Coming to the production front for ‘Spellbound’, the team has taken 15 days for modeling, around 2 weeks for rigging the characters with 3 to 4 days for set modeling along with 2D animation/ silhouette, which took 10 days, lighting and texturing was brought out in 3 week time span, with animation duration taking about 1/1/2 month, music- a week’s time and rendering the frames was done simultaneously in a span of 10 days.
With a look and feel composed with a blend of western and Indian feel, the use of technicalities and technologies for creating this short film ranges from Autodesk Maya Flash, Harmony, Nuke, Adobe Premiere, Adobe After, and Muster.
In the opening shot of the short film, the team wanted to establish a gala in a village, but at the same time they didn’t want to spend time in 3D process, and hence they brought into picture 2D flash students and completed the establishment shot.
The team at Reliance AIMS feels that the core ingredients which make this short film amazing are simple animation techniques having visual appeal suiting to the needs of mass audience.
Rajnikant and Vivek, share more “We used simple animation techniques avoiding snappy and realistic ones as our concern was its visual appeal attention to details and technical excellence and we wanted everything to be perfect whether it was storyline (script), production part or the post production.”
Informing more about the challenges, Sathish asserts, “The challenge with Spellbound was to motivate the students and get them to work as a team, managing around 20 students and getting them to work in a studio environment and setting. Making them adhere to production and delivery schedule was the most important. Also, getting the retakes done for animation, lighting and rendering simultaneously along with other aspects of production were a challenging aspect. The most challenging and tough scene for the team, which needed a lot of re working, was the scene where the monkey is dancing with the cap.”
Rajnikant and Vivek share more on this by saying, “This scene shows a great thrill when we want to tease somebody, the true child in us comes out then and the aspect of tit for tat competition starts.”
At present, Reliance AIMS students are working on a few graduation films of Animation, Live action and Visual Effects, “We are working on it, hopefully by the end of this year, we will release 3 to 4 films,” concludes, Sathish.