‘Unfold’ – A Stop Motion Animation short won the Best Animation Student Category Award at 2nd Delhi Shorts International Film Festival. This 3 Minutes 41 seconds Animation short made by Neha Kulkarni, draws the attention of audience towards the difficulties faced by individuals who have a hearing disability.
Neha Kulkarni, an Animation Student from IDC-IIT, spoke to AnimationXpress.com, about the development of this short.
‘Unfold’- this title brings out the creative concept of unfolding the path of imagination and fantasy. This story comprises of a ‘Household’ setting and the storyline is based on Neha’s own childhood experience. It focuses on how a little girl having a hearing disability feels left out in this world of ‘normal’ people and finds happiness in her own amazing world of origami.
This short makes its viewers realise that determination and concentration can in fact move one towards the world of creativity. As Neha finds paper folds very interesting, she used colourful craft papers, handmade papers, texture papers, wallpapers, wrap papers for character dresses, origami, room decoration and other household settings. She made use of cloth tape for the skin cover and paper dresses for the characters.
She even made sure to do an In-depth research of the several challenges faced by the individuals who can’t enjoy the essence of ‘sound’. In the process of researching, she got to know that hearing impaired individuals find it difficult to learn and pronounce vowels, consonants, words, sentences by normal teaching ways, but understand through lip reading and phonetic methods. “Rajesh Apte’s poem on how a hearing impaired person accepts his life inspired me to build a strong base for writing the script for this short”, Neha highlights.
The Shots were edited using the Adobe Premiere Pro software, Chroma editing was done on Adobe After Effects and sound was edited by Shantanu Yennemadi on Avid’s Pro Tools MP9. Neha has used top angles throughout this short. “As the characters were made using delicate materials, maintenance of the paper fold models was no less than risk handling.”Adds more.
Snigdha Banerjee (Neha’s friend) dubbed for the mother character and Prof. C.P. Narayan dubbed for the father’s animation character. She was guided by Prof. Shilpa Ranade, Prof.Narayan, Prof. Sumant Rao, Prof. Nina Sabnani and Prof. Phani Tatali in the making of this short.