Students of Arena Animation Jayanagar, Banglore have recently won two awards, 5th Avatar International film festival award-2012 and Animation Habba- 2012, for its two classical animation based film, “Follow me” and “Maharaja International Bank” respectively. Animations in both the films have different style of animation, look and feel.
One of the awarded film “Follow me” is based on present day relationship between parents and their children. Parents always try to protect their children if they find them doing anything wrong. But they forget that children grow up following the footsteps of their parents. So at the end they start to realize that they have only left the wrong footprints for their children to follow and start to feel guilty. They tried to show this irony of fate in a form of gag.
“Follow me” is made in full classical 2D animation. Softwares are only used in postproduction part where background is digitally painted. Students have followed all the steps from preproduction to production to postproduction to make this film. In line with style of animation, characters, color palette and background design has been given equal importance so that the whole film gives a feeling of rocking upper middle-class Indian family of today’s society.
Maharaja International Bank is basically a Flash based classical animation with a feel of cutout style. Apart from character design and preproduction part, everything was software based. But basic idea of making this film was truly Indian so for overall look and feel of the movie they referred to Indian miniature painting.
Softwares used for both the films include Flash CS4, Toon Boom 4.5, Photoshop CS4, sound fordge, Premier CS4 and After Effects CS4. People involved in the projects were Santosh Kumar A.P, Rushika.T, Saptak Paul, Amit Debnath, Chiranjit Ghosh and Indira Gupta. It took around two months to complete both the projects as they were working simultaneously.
About winning the awards Chiranjit Ghosh, Creative Head, Arena Jayanagar shared, “Well, this is kind of difficult to explain but definitely a contended feeling is there. Students get highly inspired and encouraged with such recognition. Because of which our producer Indira Gupta is very supportive in making such films and encourage the fact that students should make more such films.”
Arena Animation prefer more to expose and exploit traditional animation film, and like to work on those lines with lot of experiment mixed in it. They are trying their hands on some clay and mixed media work.
Advising the young animators and students Chiranjit Ghosh said, “Think out of the box and follow your passion, if you have any concept just don’t leave it in the mid way. Put your patience and start working on it. At the end everything is hardwork, lots and lots of practice whether its pencil or with mouse choice is yours”.