she's coming to life!

Slowly but surely!

Audio!

I can now officially say that I will be getting audio recorded straight from India for my thesis!

This talented student from Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology has agreed to help me, as well as some others.

watercolors

Mrs. Roy Turnaround

3D model turnaround for my main character.

victoria memorial

Mrs Roy, in progress

la la concept art

a cup of nostalgia to keep me warm

Finally got around to doing some concept sketches. I'm trying to get an idea of what my 3D character should look like. I decided to create an original character from scratch instead of trying to modify an existing rig. If I were to stick with the interviews I have so far, my character is an old woman and I want her to look something like this. Unfortunately, I don't have a scanner here so I can't scan my recent character sketches.

I also got the inspiration from a recent lecture at my internship to use watercolor textures on the 3D environments, to make the transitions into the 2D animations smoother. The difference in environments can be portrayed by warm and cool colors. ^This is her seated in her home in America, reminiscing about Kolkata.

TVPaint test

First little project using TV Paint animation. Was just testing out the brushes and colors. I used the watercolor and Chinese brushes downloaded from the website. The background is based off an actual location- the view from our terrace back at home.

Thanks to Blogger, you can't see any of the texture quality of the background..

UPDATE (o6/05/2011):

Also did a multiplane test in maya (couldn't do as much with it since I originally created the background as one layer, so it may as well have been done in AfterEffects..):

Here's a better quality video. Password: tvp

dhaak dhol

Whoa! This is awesome!! I can't believe I hadn't seen this before... This is a pretty good representation of the excitement and dynamics of the festival of Durga Puja, my favorite Bengali festival as a resident of Kolkata. Love the metamorphoses. And nice soundscape towards the end too!

people's stories

I recently stumbled upon the StoryCorps project and find each and every one of them inspiring. This one is probably my favorite.

My thesis is still in a very amorphous stage right now, especially after talking to many professors about it before leaving for summer vacation. It is a good thing though (even though I'm panicking a little.. or quite a bit), because I won't find the best film for me to make unless I give myself the chance to explore.

That being said, I realized that I have never actually written what my thesis is about in this blog. It's always been about inspirational posts, but I should probably describe what these inspirations are for. It'll give me good practice to pitch my idea to to people too.

In short, it is a film about Kolkata (my hometown in India) and reminiscing.

It started off as a very personal film, through which I was going to express my own sentiments about Kolkata- little things that I miss from the town, things I wish I had experienced to the fullest extent, missed opportunities to immerse myself in the culture and inspirations offered by the town. The main idea was to express how one does not appreciate the place they live in until they have lived apart from that place for a while- an idea that almost all people can relate to, not just people who have lived in a different country.

I wanted to express these personal ideas through a middle-aged female character's voice. The character (in 3D) will be shown on-screen speaking, in an interview context (like we see in documentaries, except she may not necessarily be seated idly in front of the camera like in most documentaries. She could be busy doing her own household chores while she is reminiscing). These shots of her will be juxtaposed with 2D, "experimental" animations related to her memories and what she is talking about.

Her words were going to be scripted and I was going to get my mother or a professional actress with a Bengali (Indian) accent to read it out and make it sound conversational and natural. However, after speaking with many people about it, I realized that I run the risk of making the voice sound "scripted" and restricted. I want the character to sound like she is speaking from her heart, with the natural flaws of discourse coming into play. This is when I decided that it might be a good idea to let go of the idea of expressing my own feelings and ideas and interview other people in the same situation instead- other Bengalis who have lived in Kolkata before and are now living here in the US. I don't know exactly what I would get from these interviews, but I can compose and direct my questions to get the interviewees to express the ideas I initially began with. Either way, I'm looking for a natural performance that would be fun to animate to and build a film from.

After watching the StoryCorps series and some of Paul Fierlinger's Drawn from Memory pieces, I'm hoping that I can get a short and sweet anecdote or description of a specific memory related to Kolkata that I can create my film around. So this summer, I'll be out looking for people to interview. It may take more than one sessions with one person, or a thousand people to find one voice and one story that I can use for my film.

I'll be out in the Bay Area this summer interning at Pixar so I'll be looking for people there to talk to and interview. I've already found two communities that could be potentially useful, and possibly the only people I can approach. It's all very "up-in-the-air" at the moment, but it's part of the process.

So task 1: list out interview questions and prepare to pitch my idea to my potential interviewees.

thesis has been approved!

As of two weeks...

And here's more inspiration

Although this is rotoscoped (which I don't want to use in my film), I like the style.

I read a memoir today...

Recognized my love for memoirs. This one's by Joan Didion about NYC. It's a bittersweet memoir, and beautifully written, with great images.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~zkurmus/html/didion.html

^ If this link should stop working, Google search "Goodbye to All That" by Joan Didion.

soundscapes

Here're some examples for Kolkata soundscapes:

^ This one's a great example

Doing the sound will be tricky and I'm still thinking about it.. I would love to be able to record sounds directly from the place, but there is a 2% chance of that happening.

For the music, I plan on recording my mom playing the harmonium. Maybe even singing with it. There are a lot of songs and poems that Rabindranath Tagore has written and sung. I'm sure I'll find many about Kolkata among them.

This isn't the best clip of the music I'm going for, but here's how a harmonium sounds:

squiggly lines inspire me

These are cool:

My Mother's Coat (excerpt) from Moth on Vimeo.

learn some

I realized I have some version of Corel Painter that came free with my Intuos tablet. I'm trying to see how good I am with digital painting, so I started working on this. It's built on top of a photograph, so it wasn't from scratch.

Let's see how this goes.

decided

Cool clip I found about the making of Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage.

So, for those who don't know, I have finally decided that my thesis will be about my hometown, Calcutta/Kolkata (India). A lyrical thought process of a woman recalling little glimpses and experiences from her hometown that she misses.

ongoing list

Films I want to watch from start to finish:

Tale of Tales by Yuri Norstein

Bridgehampton by John Canemaker

Going Equipped by Peter Lord (I actually just watched this one, and it is pretty much the structure I'm looking for in my film. Focusing on character animation and body language for the monologue, in 3D, and intercutting the interview footage with more poetic imagery, in my case, nice textured, gestural, sort of experimental animations)

stumbled upon this

Wanted to quickly jot down this inspiration source, lest I forget:

http://www.milindmulick.com/

and his blog:

http://milindmulick.blogspot.com/

So good!!

carnet de voyage

I've been in love with the Oscar nominated short by Bastien Dubois: Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage ever since I saw it on screen at our school in the Animation Show of Shows (presented by Ron Diamond).

It's a beautiful film with a wonderful blend of culture and texture that reminds me of my own Calcutta. If I decided to go with my more personal idea for my thesis, it would be greatly inspired by this film. I absolutely love working with textures and I can see the things I want to talk about (literally) in this documentary-style thesis of mine to be represented with textures like that (even if they are abstract concepts)...

Maybe the canvas can be a banana leaf. I remember times from my childhood in India when I went to a very traditional wedding or funeral and I was served food on a banana leaf. Most often, we would sit on the floor and eat with our hands. So much texture involved. Feeling the food with your own hands. The food being presented on such a rough texture. Maybe I could use the banana leaf as my canvas, the way Dubois uses his journal and his collected postcards as his canvas.

Maybe a peacock feather? Hand-made paper? (I did that for my film Bhava Raga Tala already).

Even a wall spat on with red-stained spit from chewing paan all the time! Maybe not as grotesque as that, but more like a red watercolor spill on a rough canvas!

I really want to experiment with watercolors, even though I'm terrible at it. Even oil paints. Anything. Even if it's something as loose and gestural as this:

Also check out this link to the Ashok Art Gallery in Delhi, Landscape Category.

Unlike Dubois, whose film is based on his travel experiences (see more in this interesting interview), mine would come straight from my subconscious. I am familiar with the concepts and images I want to portray in the film- I have the sight, sound and smell all memorized. It's all about taking those ideas out of my mind and experimenting with how I can present it to people who aren't familiar with those images.

Like I said, I want to use mixed media. Toon shaded CG, paint animation, cut out animation, hand-drawn animation. I want to leave some amount of flexibility to it so that I can use any material that comes to my mind as relevant and inspiring at the time that I am animating a particular idea. This is what Dubois said in another interview that really caught my attention:

"When I make travel logs, my style changes all the time from one drawing to the next, from one page to the next… From the very beginning I felt this would really enrich the film! I pushed the vice rather far, since I even used local animation crafts: embroidery, scrapped cars, etc. Changing styles for each shot was really a lot of fun: rather than repeating the same technique and using the same tools, I could continue to create the whole time the film was being made." (cited)

I'm starting to like this idea more. Because everytime I pitch my mime-carnival idea to someone, I hear the same thing, "But mime's don't talk!" True, but...

Note: I have no right to the inspirational images posted.

See-Saw

So, there's something about this stage of brainstorming that makes you feel like you're forever riding a see-saw through changing seasons. One swing, and this idea seems the most appealing. Another swing and you're inspired by a wholly different idea, color scheme, thought or memory. It's beautiful now. But gets worrisome after a bit, when you think of deadlines!!

Anyways. So today I've swung in a different direction and am thinking: documentary about things I miss. The theme of home. Pastel colors from Calcutta. Vibrant even. Someone talking on-screen (in the form of poetry?), intercut with glimpses of little moments and nostalgia.

Holi, that I would always miss because of Chemistry homework?

Idol immersion?

Dhakis, to whose beats I've never had the courage to dance to?

Drinking tea out of a saucer? Random lovers in our neighborhood perched on a bicycle under a tree? Crossing the bridge every day to go to school? I'd always be sleepy on the way to school, and have a headache from the heat and schoolwork on the way back. I never had a chance to appreciate the beauty of the place.

Maybe it could be about some of the (small/simple) things I've experienced, but never to the fullest extent, the way I wanted to.

I don't know. Maybe.

The Mimes

I also enjoy the concept of mimes. The idea of having a mime talk to the camera in an interview-context intrigues me.

First of all, when you think of mimes, you don't think of talking. Secondly, mimes are interesting people to study in the field of animation. Acting without dialogue. Conveying a sense of weight and balance we animators look for, to things that do not tangibly exist in front of them.

There is a possibility that my thesis can revolve around a mime and a carnival/circus. Two different worlds. Two contrasting color schemes that can playfully merge together. It's all quite abstract in my mind right now. Which is why I am hoping that writing will help me make things more concrete.

I need to do more research on mimes. Three books I need/want to read if I am to go ahead with this idea:

*The Last Butterfly by Michael Jacot (I think this is a movie as well)

*The Clown by Heinrich B oll

*Coulrophobia by Jacob Appel Pushcart

After researching, I also found out that a well-known classical Indian dance known as the Kathakali is considered as the non-Western form of mime. This kind of excites me, but I don't know what to do with this excitement. It's interesting, because the world of Kathakali is vastly colorful like that of a circus; completely opposite to the color palette of the mime we know. Not just that, I've made a film (although it wasn't as expressive and "pushed/exaggerated" as I wanted it to be) about a classical Indian dance. And I've made an experimental animated documentary before. It'd be a nice summary of what I've done so far, but I don't know how I would tie it into a possible "story" yet.

female Kathakali artists are rarely seen, I think

Novels related to Kathakali:

*God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

*Mistress by Anita Nair

Also, before I forget. I'm going for mixed-media. 3D will be in it, yes!

Now What?

It's time for my thesis! Do I know what I'm doing? Hardly!

I finally finished my second major film, Dissonance, at RIT (see my other blog) and now it's time to think about my thesis! So this blog will be wholly and completely dedicated to precisely that- messy products of brain storms; inspirations from poetry, photographs, conversations and spring-time; excited posts about progress; not-so-excited posts about downfalls (hopefully will keep that to a minimum!), concepts, animation tests, render tests, etc. etc. etc.

Thesis will be proposed in 5 weeks or so, so I need to get started. So far, all I can say is that I want to make an animated documentary and I like circuses, carnivals and Europe.

I recently watched The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and was very inspired by the costumes, set design and overall visual mood set up in the film (not so much the story):