Session 35 summary
Vaibhav says that animators are story tellers and their medium is animation. He also adds that films cannot always be character based but characters make it possible to carry it forward and make them memorable. Characters play a strong role in influencing the story, many times either the characters will change the story or the situations change the characters.
Vaibhav talks about his small animation studio in Mumbai where many animations have been created like Simpu, the Maths Teacher- a character for Channel V, advertisements for batteries which were quite popular and much more. They did quite a lot of stop motion animation and everything was handmade. He loves to take characters he knows and create them, the characters were taken from his life into his stories. They usually work with different artists who work in different ways. They also worked on a Cement ad which was quite popular in Andhra Pradesh, the feature film TaareZameen Par and the digital zoo zoos. When creating a particular film for a brand it must be kept in mind that the brand is getting promoted. They also did films according to their wish lists. At one point of time they had gotten sick of digital projects so they decided to make films for Nickelodeon with paper cut outs-Nick Cricket. These physical projects used a lot of stop motion. Sometimes the medium defines the character. Visually they try to have a lot of fun. Many of the frames have to be built and they experience the fun of not using the computer is something fresh. For the Rock Band animation they did a little 2D drawings on top of things.
When they were jobless between two projects they wanted to try the animation of shape morphing- Lamput. They cooked up stories and tried to pitch it to Nickelodeon but they did not show any interest. Two years later, they sent it to Cartoon network who planned to do a pilot project with them. They had very short time to tell the story in this project as there was no dialogue so a lot of effort was put in the drawings to balance it, hence the story notes were visuals. Even the fight sequence on the fan blade was done in great detail. Since, the film is short and there is no post credit they usually incorporated the credits in the background. A lot of clues are left in the film about the special events occurring in the life of the team of designers.
Vaibhav says that it is important to explore different mediums and when one visualises their story, they must come up with ideas on how they want to build their characters and their personalities. For Vaibhav it is important for him to know about the characters, since if you have the data about the character then you can build the world by yourself.
About the Speaker
Vaibhav Kumaresh
Animation Film maker
Director and Founder
Vaibhav Studios
Mumbai
Vaibhav Kumaresh is an Emmy-nominated animation filmmaker and founder-director of Vaibhav Studios in Mumbai. A Fine Arts graduate from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Vaibhav is the Hon. Secretary of The Animation Society of India (TASI) and also teaches animation at various design schools across India. He has worked inanimations like; Channel V’s Simpu, Vodafone Zoo Zoo, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network which has been well received by the audience.
