Since its inception in 2016, TBS Planet, founded by Rajeev Tamhankar has been known for its interesting line-up of comic books for all age groups. Over the years, TBS Planet Comics has only grown to be counted among India’s fastest growing comics and graphic novel publishers. In fact, it is the only Indian action comics publisher to come out with one new title every month besides being official comic partners for Bollywood Movies like Shivaay and A Flying Jatt within the first year of their operations.
Now, it’s ready to take a leap into the field of animation with their first animated short film on Chanakya’s biopic. Completely built by in-house team members and partners, this short film will trace the life of Chanakya right from his childhood to backing Chandragupta Maurya in every way as the ruler of unified India.
Chanakya (also known as Kautilya and Vishnu Gupt), the author of Arthashastra dreamt of a unified India more than 2000 years ago and is still widely regarded as one of the sharpest strategists of India. Being an ardent admirer of this genius, Tamhankar chose to model the first animated film from the house of TBS Planet, on this man who sets a strong example of leadership, vision and politics.
Talking to AnimationXpress about the decision to make a move from comics to animation, Tamhankar said, “ Comics and animation are very interrelated fields. I have always wanted to see TBS Planet evolve out of being just a vernacular comics company to also producing vernacular animated video content.”
Directed by Subhajit Das from Creative Knot, the film is created in 2D animation whose entire process has been very challenging given it’s their first big experiment in this genre. “We had several rounds of discussions on how long the movie should be which was eventually decided to keep the short film within five minutes because the attention span of the audience today is very less,” he commented.
After hearing the script, Das helped the team to break it down panel by panel and arrange it in animatics so that the viewers would find the script crisp and moving at a good pace. Tamhankar added, “ We then got down to scripting a tight story, then storyboarding it… eventually rendering and animating it. Overall the process took more than three months. We are now still remaining with post production work and are expecting to finish that in next 10-15 days.”
TBS Planet has also roped in a number of new names for this project. Varun, one of them has been hired to work on animations and videos dedicatedly. Manabendra, a full-time animator has joined the process as well. Another member, Mohit is currently looking at the overall build of the film while the company is currently hiring sound engineer for the percussions and sound effects.
This is indeed a huge step for TBS Planet as they are diving into an unchartered dimension. “I must say it has been a very good learning experience for the entire crew. Even small things like editing and voice overs were fascinating for us. I just hope that viewers like the animation too,” Tamhankar noted.
Planning a bunch of animated films in the near future on the basis of this one, the TBS team seems to have put a lot of efforts in ideating, executing and creating this project. And response from the audience will decide on the fate of its future projects. Amen to that!