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.