Hasta La Motion!

There are possibly nothing that connect Indians like cricket and films. Both these genres are like religion and hold a special place in our hearts. And when both of these come together, it’s sure to create a stir.

With the IPL fever soaring high, independent creator of original Indian entertainment, Chikuliba Media, has created an animated short – KPL (Kurukshetra Premier League) which gives a new spin to the mythic battle and depicts war from the Indian epic as a game of cricket.

Animated films in India is still a niche, but is making its presence felt through some great work being made almost everyday. And KPL promises to add to this thriving genre. KPL is a self-financed project that’s action packed, darkly funny with a rousing chenda melam score and great sound design as well as a breezy watch for animation and mythology admirers with a runtime of just over four minutes. The synopsis goes like this :

Boom Boom Bheem is in excellent form as the Pandavas look to clinch a historic win. The Kauravas have one last trick up their sleeve. If it doesn’t work, only a miracle can save them.

Here’s cricket, before it became a gentleman’s game!

Ujwal Nair

Speaking to AnimationXpress, Chikuliba co-founder and animator Ujwal Nair revealed the idea behind this unique short, “As a kid I used to play cricket on the streets and it was far from ideal unlike international cricket on TV, where batsmen allowed the smallest things to bother them. Like movement in front of the sidescreen or a tiny sliver of wood chipping off their bat. To me it seemed like they were being fussy! Then about a year and a half ago, I came across a scenario where in the heat of battle [Kurukshetra], Bheem got upset about a scratch on his ‘gada’ and demanded a new one. That got me thinking about other similarities between the Kurukshetra war and cricket. The former began to look more and more like an 18-day test match! Every day, the fight began and ended with the sun rising and setting. The battle was divided into phases in which different warriors dominated, much like an impressive lineup of batsmen. Also, while the Kurukshetra war is more bloody and gruesome than anything we’ve seen on a cricket field, there is an element of violence in the gentleman’s game. The cricket ball can do serious harm and batsmen are forced to wear all this protective gear just like the battle armour. Once these parallels became evident, I got excited about telling a story in which the mythic war resembled a game of cricket.”

Working in the animation industry since 2012, Nair’s first job was at Animagic, Mumbai, where he worked as an animatic editor. Currently, he’s  working as an animatic supervisor at Graphic India, Bengaluru and worked on KPL in his free time over the last year and a half. KPL was created to test the limits of low-budget action film, being made in 2D animation. Nair’s goal had been to tell the story of this short in an exciting, funny and the most dynamic way possible. Though he preferred medium of 2D hand-drawn animation, animating the backgrounds and tracking camera movements, was challenging in 2D.

“To make things a little easier, I decided to do simple flat coloured backgrounds, designed characters without clothes or jewellery and avoided light and shadow for the most part. I worked almost exclusively in Adobe Flash. I story-boarded, designed, animated and did the backgrounds in Flash. I worked on each shot separately, then put them together in Adobe Premiere. I played with the shapes and proportions of the characters to make them look interesting,” he mentioned.

Financed by Nair himself and his wife, Indou Theagrajan, the background score and sounds in KPL casts a lingering spell. The sound artists took about a month to complete their work on the film. It has a very soothing earthly feel and it sets the mood of the film from the very beginning. Given a silence animated short, the sounds play a very important role in engaging the audience.  

“The sound artists have weaved their magic by combining Foley work with a library of sounds they had previously collected. We decided to use realistic sound design to elevate the sense of scale and create the feeling of being in a packed cricket stadium. The music came from a half hour recording of a chenda melam performance by a sound designer based in Kerala. I thought this type of music was appropriate because it was tribal, rhythmic and energetic. It suited the stripped down visual style of the film. I chose sections of the music that matched the pace of the film,” commented Nair.

The team that composed such a wonderful music comprised of :

Sound Design and Mix – Adharsh Kalyanakumar and Bhuvanesh Manivannan

Sound Effects Editing – A. Sathish Kumar

Dubbing Studio – Sound Parti Studios

Dubbing Engineer – Sudharsan Lingam

Live Music Recording – Arun Rama Varma Thampuran.

Apart from this talented people, Nair was always backed by his wife Theagrajan throughout the filmmaking process who also helped plan the promotion, release of the film and was the test audience. Both of them started Chikuliba Media that’s named after an Indian version of rock, paper, scissors, with the goal of making original Indian entertainment.

What stands out about KPL, is its ending which you can’t miss! Without giving away too much about it, the ending is loosely based on the story of Jayadratha, a character from The Mahabharata who had a peculiar boon whereby whoever kills him will have their head explode. Due to a series of events, Arjuna vowed to kill Jayadratha before sunset on the 14th day of the Kurukshetra war, which Nair cleverly in the climax the film.

Now that KPL is out for the world to see, presently, Nair is working on a podcast called The Odds in which he along with his creative collaborator, Thomas Manuel, talk to Indian artists about art, compromise and creative labour. The series explores themes relevant to Indian artists with excerpts from our conversations with some of them. Manuel is writing and hosting the podcast while Nair co-producing and animating certain inspiring quotes by artists we spoke to. It’s slated to  come out later this year.

Apart from that, he has also written a pilot for an animated series and are ideating for their next animated short film. Animated short film as a medium is a great format to test original concepts and develop one’s technical and creative skills. And Indian animation industry is moving towards that with steady steps. It’s a storytelling medium that doesn’t require as much time and money as a feature film.

Nair further added,  “If more artists around the country make short films, I think Indian animation can really find its voice. That said, short film-making is not a viable career yet and it can be challenging to get an audience for your film without name recognition. I tried to do that with KPL.”

Shall we say amen to that?

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Viacom18’s digital video-on-demand streaming service and India’s second largest AVOD OTT platform, VOOT has recently celebrated its third anniversary with 100+ billion minutes of watch time. Promising to offer quality and myriad content in the digital ecosystem, VOOT now aims to reach 100 million monthly active users (MAU) within the fiscal year.

Currently driven by an advertising supported video-on-demand model, VOOT will continue to build scale by soon diversifying from one business model of AVOD to four – VOOT AVOD, VOOT Kids, VOOT International and VOOT Freemium.

Last December, VOOT content head Monika Shergill had hinted at ATF 2018 in Singapore about a lot of content being taken up with over 200 animated characters for VOOT Kids. Lately Viacom18 group CEO and MD Sudhanshu Vats revealed, “The mission at VOOT is to take every story to its audience and every audience to stories. We’re BETA testing in the market – VOOT Kids. Voot Kids is a another very unique initiative from us. It’s one of a kind product which goes beyond watch and videos. The main theme is – ‘Watch, Read, Listen and Learn’. There are e-books, jingles, gaming and lot more. You’ll hear a lot from us about it as we go forward.”

Shergill further added in a candid chat, “It’s going to be an amazing product and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for it.”

Beside VOOT Kids, as part of its future growth strategy, the OTT platform has revealed expanding and enriching current content library with an interesting line-up of over 30+ originals across genres and languages, to be launched this year. Few of them are : Law and Honour, Naaz, Love All, The Raikar Case, Kaisi Yeh Yaariaan – Season 4, Marzi and Asura.

“India will have an online consumer base of more than 500mn by 2022. Of this, more than 3/4th will be consuming video content. While technological advancements allow us to personalise content consumption, growth for the category will come from our ability to segment our offerings to multiple consumer segments accelerated by the three A’s – accessibility, availability and affordability. VOOT has crossed the 100bn watch minutes’ mark in three years and we are now targeting 100mn monthly active users within this financial year. Additionally, we are segmenting the VOOT business into four uniquely focussed propositions – the existing AVOD model and the upcoming freemium offering, VOOT Kids and VOOT International,” added Vats.

Institutionalising the branded content play, VOOT also announced the launch of VOOT Studios – a business performance-oriented content tech solution for advertisers looking to connect with digital audiences with branded shows, sponsorships, interactive formats in addition to other bespoke solutions.

From left to right: Akash Banerji, Monika Shergill, VOOT Technology and Engineering head Mohit Srivastava, VOOT Sales head Abhigyan Shekhar, VOOT Business Planning and Operations head Gaurav Bhasin and Sudhanshu Vats

Speaking about the branded content play for the platform, VOOT AVOD business head Akash Banerji mentioned, “Brands today realise regular ad spot while important is not sufficient to drive resonance with the consumer. Branded content solutioning is hence the way forward given that it allows for bespoke content curation and subtle communication embedded into the narrative of the show. VOOT Studios will allow brands to bring the world of story-telling, data and tech all together to deliver the brand message and the ROI effectively for the business.”

With the proliferation of digital content and its increasing consumption across mediums, understanding consumer behaviour now plays a critical role. VOOT’s consumer insights product MAVARIC is thus built to help advertisers identify the right audience thus ensuring high impact via communication. MAVARIC helps advertisers with consumer insights as well as target their messaging beyond simple demographic profiles and instead focuses on enhanced insights around online behaviour, purchase behaviour, affinity and interest and more.

Reinforcing the importance of interactivity on OTT platforms, VOOT also attempts to strengthen its current offering with the addition of five new programmes in the next few months which will fuel further growth and attract users to the platform.

Now available on iOS, Android, Web, and Amazon Fire TV, and built on a robust technology backbone, VOOT further strengthens its technology and distribution system by announcing over 20+ new distribution partners across the travel, broadband and mobile ecosystem as well as with OEMs, like CloudWalker,  ShareIt , Act Fibrenet and travel network company OLA amongst others.

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The recent live-action adventure movie by Disney, Dumbo has amazed the audience with its visuals. The movie is the remake of 1941 American animated film Dumbo, where Disney made the innocent-eyed baby elephant fly in the air using his big ears.  In 2019, to create a sequence of making an elephant fly in the sky on screen for the audience MPC Studios has used the magic of VFX  to make it happen.  In conversation with AnimationXpress MPC VFX supervisor Patrick Ledda shared the behind the scenes in making the movie Dumbo. Here is the excerpt:

Can you share how many VFX shots there are in the movie Dumbo? How long did it take in post-production?

I believe the total VFX shot count is around 1800, over 90 minutes! MPC was responsible for close to 1200 shots. Post-production was around 18 months although some of the work was started even before principal photography began.

 Please could you share a little about the unique techniques and trends used by your team for the movie Dumbo?

There are always constant improvements that we do although it’s hard to say how unique some of our techniques are. I would say that in terms of research and development, our main achievement was the development of high-resolution skin deformer to allow us to simulate every single skin wrinkle and shun away from traditional displacement maps. This allowed us to dynamically simulate skin wrinkles and change their appearance as the elephant’s move.

What were the pressure points for the team creating the enchanting appearance of the circus in the movie?

Firstly, I should say that most of the circus was practically built on set. It was so large that it needed to be split into three different sound stages. This meant that you could never have the entire circus shot through the camera. We, therefore, created a replica of the circus to allow easy digital set extensions. Some parts of the circus such as trees, background tents, and so on were never built practically so we had to create CG versions for those. The main creative challenge was the creation of skies. Tim Burton wanted a storybook feel so he wasn’t too keen on over realistic looking skies. He wanted something that was real but expressionistic. We spent a significant amount of time developing this look to match the practical sets which also had an expressionistic feel. Every scene had a different sky, meticulously designed to match the mood of the film.

How many team members from your VFX studio(s) were involved in the making of the movie

I believe we had close to 1000 crew members from artists, production staff, supervisors and technical staff.

Have you outsourced any of the VFX work to any other studios for ease in the post-production workflow? If not, then what are the reasons behind that?
 No, all of the work that was awarded to MPC was completed by our studio. Very rarely, we outsource work because we can handle large amount of shots and don’t require additional help. We had teams in Bangalore, London and Montreal working on the show.

What software was used in the creation of the content?
We use a vast array of commercial software together with MPC’s own proprietary tools. Some of the main software used was Maya, zBrush, Mari, Houdini, Katana, prMan and Nuke. We used MPC’s proprietary tools for groom (Furtility), crowd (Alice) as well as other internal tools and plugins.

What were the main required VFX sequences asked for by the director, Tim Burton? How did you and your team begin working on them?
MPC worked on dozens of sequences with the main focus being on the main character, Dumbo. As we worked on almost the entire movie, it’s difficult to say which are the main VFX sequences however there are a few which spring to mind.

Firstly, the first time we see Dumbo was a very special sequence. Dumbo is revealed under a mountain of hay. We developed a great FX setup for hay which we used on many shots throughout the movie. It was critical that the audience would connect to him early on; therefore we focused on creating an emotional connection and make him look adorable.

Another great sequence was the scene where he is given a bath. This was very complicated technically and creatively. Creating CG foam it’s quite complicated and given that Dumbo had to interact with actors, it created a whole list of challenges. Also, Tim wanted to direct the foam to represent Dumbo’s mood. We ended up using a combination of CG foam and practical foam elements which we shot at MPC.

Is there a special sequence of the movie you would like to share with us?

There are so many! However, it’s worth mentioning that, we created an entire CG jungle for the last scene of the movie. The work was done in a matter of months and we are very proud of the result. We created an expressionistic world comprising of elephant herds and waterfalls.

What’s next can we expect from the studio after Dumbo?

MPC are always working on exciting new projects like Detective Pikachu, Godzilla King of the monster, Lion King and so on.

Overall MPC studio seems to have done a great job to make the audience believe that they are living in a world where the flying elephant Dumbo really does exist.

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A journey that began watching cartoons and laying videogames led way to some interesting characters from popular animated features like Penguins of Madagascar, How To Train your Dragon: The Hidden World and many others. After working as freelancer at Revolution Software for the Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars director´s cut videogame, animator Ravi Kamble moved to Manchester to work at RedVision as a junior animator.

While being at Redstar he learned a lot about aspects of 3D production beyond just animating, but felt the need to make a jump into feature animation and improve his skills as an animator, and enrolled in online school, iAnimate. Kamble has worked on his first feature film project at Oscar nominated studio Kandor Graphics for Justin and the Knights of Valour.

Kamble also managed to get an opportunity to work in DreamWorks dedicated unit in Bengaluru for the feature Penguins of Madagascar, where he got to grow as a feature animator and character developer.

He carried his supervising and mentoring experience to help build the animation team at Oriental DreamWorks in Shanghai, now called Pearl studio. “I decided to pursue some freelance projects working remotely from Spain, along with a small gig at MPC in London for three months, where I developed the villain of the upcoming Pokemon: Detective Pikachu and experienced the VFX industry for a short while,” added he.

Kamble got all the more luckier around his few last months in London, with an offer from DreamWorks in LA to join the team on How To Train your Dragon: The Hidden World.

We would like to know about your experience with working on villainous characters?

I love villain characters and am tend to be more attached to a story with a memorable great villain. Villains that have major flaws are the best for me, because they are grounded and have a strong reason to be the opposing force, and their threat and menace can become believable since you actually will empathise with his or her pitfalls. This in animation can translate to ample range of motion or expression, and not necessarily always big and daunting but also even intellectual or funny.

When I first was working on Dave the octopus, he was written as a more sinister character, but as we were starting production in his scenes, we found the tone of his personality was transitioning to a far more comedic personality, and we tried to find a balance by playing against John Malkovich´s more serious voice with a visually more entertaining, broad and exaggerated performance for the character. Working on the villain Meowtwo in Pokemon: Detective Pikachu prooved to be challenging as well, because his communication and powers were all telepathic: this meant no talking with the face, and the least effort in locomotion as possible.

How different is it from creating other characters?

Villains to me are the most interesting types of characters, because their motivations tend to come in various ways, as opposed to heroes and protagonists. As they tend to have lesser screen-time, they come out to be a bit more secretive or mysterious, and there can be opportunities to be inventive with their appearance and mannerisms, and contribute to their unique presence in the story.

How has it been working on animated hits like Penguins of Madagascar for the character development of Dave the octopus?

I had a lot of homework to do, because feature animation was a whole different ball game compared to my limited experience in commercials and small projects back when I was in Europe. There is always a big driving force with these projects, which is the reaction of audiences at the theatre: no materialistic reward can be more fulfilling than watching people laugh or cry when your work shows on the big screen!

We did a fair amount of research on real life octopus footage, studying locomotion on tentacles and behaviours in land and underwater, but we had to go beyond reality and borrow a lot from old classic cartoons to keep things within the Madagascar Universe and favour light hearted entertainment. To my surprise, my work got on this movie got me nominated for an Annie Award for Best individual achievement in character animation back in 2014, a recognition I am deeply honoured to have achieved but that I can credit to the entire team as well.

Kamble feels that every animator should be exposed to character development. He finds it very fulfilling to craft a character from the ground.

How has working in different countries for various projects influenced your culturally?

It’s an honour to have been able to travel so much for the sake of my job, and see various cultures and identifying the common universal qualities that unites us, which makes one even more confident in art.

How challenging was it facing the work transition from slapstick animation of ‘Penguins of Madagascar’ to semi-realistic projects like ‘How to train you dragon 3’?

It was very challenging, which is what I love about animation: every project, every character, and every scene always feels new. Going back to the drawing board and doing the required research and learning is part of our job. As opposed to the Madagascar Universe, where UPA cartoons and Chuck Jones and classical 2D animation was the main source of study and inspiration for the visual style, How to train you dragon 3 is heavily grounded in reality and needs a proper grasp of physicality and truthful, grounded performance. In a project like Penguins of Madagascar, entertainment was a key factor, but in How to train you dragon 3, a thorough study and portrayal of locomotion and physics is essential.

How was your experience while working on How to train you dragon 3?

Working on How to train you dragon 3 was a great learning experience. The level of detail it required on its execution was the highest benchmark. I had to really be as scientific as possible on my observation, and constantly learn from my peers. Another big aspect on working on this franchise is that you´re required to animate dragons, which are fantastical creatures that don´t exist in our world, but we´re required to make them very believable.

I began the production animating some shots in the Hidden world, when Hiccup and Astrid are riding on Stormfly passing by the glowing little dragon worms, and right afterwards had the privilege to be trusted to animate some scenes with the four winged dragon Cloudjumper, including a heavy action scene in the battleship. I also had a chance to animate some shots with the villain of the movie Grimmel and his Deathgrippers, which was very fulfilling.

What it entails to be a supervising animator? What responsibilities did you have to face when embracing such role during your time in China?

Depending on what studio you work, the title and responsibilities vary. As a supervising animator at DreamWorks, generally you´re in charge of leading one or various main characters, as well as supervising sequences of shots. This is a role I was already embracing as a character lead in India during my work on Penguins of Madagascar. But during my tenure in China at Oriental DreamWorks, we literally were building a studio from scratch, and my responsibilities grew further. I had a lot of exposure to studio building responsibilities, training a team of 30 animators along with other supervisors, and take over animation and tool development tasks working alongside other departments such as rigging, character effects and R&D. We literally were shaping up a high quality feature pipeline from the ground up and we had challenges in every department.

Considering the growing popularity of the animation sector, many students wish to pursue it as a career. What tips would you give for the aspiring animators?

I love to see people’s interest in animation, and obviously I never want to spoil their spirit in any way, but I always tend to give the same warning to make sure they know what they´re getting into: you need to be passionate, patient and humble in order to grow in life generally, and it applies to animation even more so, because is a very time consuming craft and it takes years to get good at it. I think the demands and the markets all over the world are opening many doors in the industry internationally, and so many different formats and technologies are being developed, that artists with high quality skill-sets are in high demand to make such content.

Kamble thinks of someday contributing to the Indian animation industry in a bigger scale with whatever is potentially capable of. “Probably it needs to happen at the right time with the right people, and with a story that everyone can believe in worth telling, not just in India but in the rest of the world as well,” he concluded.

Kamble is currently busy wrapping up on the feature film Abominable, formerly called Everest, directed by Jill Culton and Todd Wilderman, to be released in September 2019.

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