Hasta La Motion!

The New Delhi based three year old service production house for game art and animation films which began as a two member team and has gone out to become a 30 member strong company, has finally come out with its own animated short film. Founded in 2013, Pencillati has successfully shipped the complete game art for three mobile gaming studios, including the wildly popular DragonSoul RPG by PerBlue.

Putting focus on the future of game art, animation production and IP creation, the studio recently released its first 3D animated short film “The Bloop Troop”. This film has been in the works for the past six months, although the first concepts had started to appear during late 2015.

Here’s the synopsis of the short:

A ruthless barbarian, a hair-splitting master archer and a knight in shining armor are brought together in the battlefield by a common enemy – a formidable fly. What ensues in this battle of epic proportions tests everyone’s skills and takes an age-old war that every human has wanted to win, to a whole new level.

As the 2:59 seconds animated clip begins to roll out, we are greeted by the huge eyed fly – who seems mischievous and smart – along with the quirky background score. The vibrant visuals, actions, humour keeps the viewer hooked throughout the short. Certain parts of the movie are well executed like the slow motion segment of the fly, the chase scene, the detailing of all the characters is well executed.

“The idea of ‘The Bloop Troop’ started taking shape towards the end of 2015 as we developed few visual art pieces and wrote more about the plot. There is more to these characters than this short film,” says the director of The Bloop Troop, Ram Singh. “We see a lot of short films and animation these days explored in several mediums and styles, but we finally decided to stick to the slapstick style of humour we grew up enjoying in old cartoons such as Tom and Jerry and Road Runner.”

With The Bloop Troop, the Pencillati team wanted to keep this project short and high quality to test their strength and pipeline in a real production scenario. “Although we are happy with the results we realised it was very much possible to aim even higher in terms of quality and scale of production within existing setup,” comments Singh.

A team of six people worked on it part-time. The music has been provided by Orange Byte Studios. Talking about the budget, Singh adds, “Our budget for this short film was not pre-calculated. As it was little more of an experiment with a new pipeline, especially when we planned on using Blender 3D setup.”

The open source 3D content creation platform – Blender is comparatively a lesser used software in India, since most Indian production pipelines are strictly Maya. This also meant that The Bloop Troop team had to learn this new software and simultaneously keep the ball rolling on the film.

Directed by Ram Singh and produced by Vivek Singh Sidhu, the short which released last week has been getting good reviews and far has managed to get 13K views on Vimeo.

Pencillati Studios will be visiting MIPJunior and MIPCOM and we wish the team all the best for their future endeavours.

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