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):