Chetan Deshmukh has worked with international studios on many Hollywood feature films and has come back to India to start his own animation studio. He has started Chetan Deshmukh Animation Studio in Pune which provides VFX for features, series and TVC, Animation, and other Digital services.
AnimationXpress.com’s Farhatnaz Ansarispoke to Chetan Deskhmukh Founder & Director of Chetan Deshmukh Animation Studio about his studio, Chintoo, projects, future plans and more…
Excerpts
What is your studio focusing on?
From last 2 to 3 years I think that everything is going digital. It’s not necessary that only films but also TV commercials so we are also venturing into digital. Hence, my focus is more to produce digital content as far as animation is concerned. Digital medium is easily acceptable and people can easily understand.
What kind of projects your studio has handled so far?
We have provided VFX for 3-4 feature films. Two were Marathi one of which called, Dev, has won many awards and appreciation and the other one we did for Zee Talkies. We also worked on the graphics for various websites. Till now we have done around 4 Apple & Android applications & 2 facebook games for a company called Total log. We also developed 3 TV commercials for Kirloskars, a manufacturing company, which is on air currently and had been aired in 7-9 languages. One TV Commercial we have done for Sansui with Saif Ali Khan and provided VFX for many other commercials as well.
What projects are you currently working on?
We are working on a facebook application but unfortunately I can’t talk more about this. We are currently working on the technique and refining it.
What are your plans for ‘Chintoo’?
We have some extensive plans for Chintoo. We are looking to develop some mobisodes and webisodes based on it. We are developing it in 2D Flash ranging from 30 secs – 2 mins.
It’s been under pre-production from last 2 years. We don’t want to create something mediocre because eventually we are competing against ourselves. The goal is to create a better product because by now people are aware of what is good animation or bad animation. We can get into production pretty much any time now.
How long does it take to develop mobisodes/ webisodes of Chintoo?
Now this is purely Flash. But still the pipeline has been set up in such a way where this kind of animation of 30 sec can be done within a day or half and people I would need is 6 or 7 because the 18 months of pre-production is involved. There are 6 set of characters and a world where Chintoo lives in. So the characters are fixed, environments are lets say, Chintoo’s house, study room, play ground, or the area where he lives in. So in 18 months of pre production we really focused on the environment, look & feel and style of Chintoo. We are also thinking of doing some 3D environments which can be rented out in a 2 weeks time.
What kind of look & feel are you giving to Chintoo?
We are going with the same look as they have designed the character 20 years ago. There has to be some tweaking which need to be done to suit the taste & requirements of today. So there is some uplifting, some graphic changes and of course when it’s a 2D character which is adapted from a print version there is lot of tweaking which is possible.
What was the challenging part in developing Chintoo?
When we have to do a character design which is already being there and people should recognize the character in a different medium is a bigger challenge because people have seen it for longer time and now they are going to relate to the digital version. So, there is lot of back n forth which has gone with the creative’s of how this character can fit into the animation space.
Today’s animators know lot of ideas and design to develop a fantastic character design but we have to keep in mind that the character can be animated with out much difficulty. So another challenge for us was we had to simplify the character which suits the animation space without going further away from the characteristics of the character.
You would be developing games as well based on Chintoo?
Yes. There are two-three options we have thought of. Simple jigsaw puzzle, taking the concept of snake and ladders more into Chintoo’s role so there might not be snakes and ladders but more of friends, families, neighbours and bitchy aunties. And it is in 3D space and no 2D animation at all. We are in talks with Vodafone as far as mobile is concerned. And as for the tablet we are producing our own content.
I think we will start off with one application or some tie up with mobile. We have planned lot of things around Chintoo but not everything will be out in one go. We are targeting to release at least 50 videos in a year time probably next year we can have more.
What are your future plans?
We are in talks for 2 other Hindi feature films, one is from the south and one is proper Bollywood feature. And we are looking to get involved in the earlier stage of the feature.