A trip to Chennai is incomplete without a visit to the beach – and collecting sea shells! Here’s the latest addition to the ever growing collection – most are broken, but we still brought them home 🙂
Using a landscape image from the internet as reference, and under the guidance of our teacher, I painted this landscape.
The paint reflected a little light, so I uploaded a little larger image, than the ones I usually upload, to compensate for the lack of clarity. As a result, it is likely that moire patterns will appear on the image.
My grandfather was the eldest in his family. We were his youngest grandchildren. The age difference between us is almost nine decades!
My grandfather’s life was very eventful. It could be said, that he lead a full life. He was a professor in the Burmese University, joined the Army during the world war, served in the foreign service thereafter. Then he helped establish one of the leading heart institutes of the country, where he worked till his last breath.
He had several hobbies. He occasionally undertook carpentry, and even tried his hand at bee-keeping. But the one hobby that lasted the longest, was photography.
None of his photographs prior to the second world war survived – the family had to leave Burma (modern Myanmar), and several possessions were lost.
All his photographs from 1945 onwards, however, were carefully pasted in a book – thick black pages bound together, with beautiful photographs chronicling the life of his children, and even some important people of the times . He developed most of his photographs himself. And he took great pains arranging them in the album, and putting captions for them. He had the foresight to know that other people will one day look at the album with no clue as to who’s in the pictures! The album is showing signs of ageing, and rarely comes out of the cupboard. But when it does, it takes us back in time, to another world.
My grandfather’s love for photography was inherited by my father, who bought a range-finder – spending almost a month’s salary on it. Point-and-shoot or compact cameras never entered our house. From our father, that passion passed onto us. Like our father and grandfather, my brother’s love for photography is serious.
Digital photography had begun entering the market by the time I was old enough to be trusted with the film camera. And my father’s old range-finder was the only one I ever used before my brother’s DSLR entered our lives.
“Extend your palm,” said my aunt to my brother during one of our visits. “I’ve been wanting to give this to you for a long time. It might be useful to you. It belonged to your grandfather,” she said.
She placed a cylindrical leather pouch in his outstretched palm. Like a child unwrapping his gift, my brother’s face lit up with excitement, when he realised, what it was, that he had inherited.
It was my grandfather’s tripod.
“It looks absolutely new!”
No one knows how old the tripod is, but it is, at the very least, seventy years old! And we know that only because the tripod features in one of the pictures my grandfather took of his youngest son – our father.
I have no living memory of my grandfather, and I often wish I had been born earlier – or he had lived longer – so that I may have been able to converse with him. But every time I take a picture, or look at that tripod, I can’t help but think he’s around us – always encouraging us to continue documenting life.
This is a painting of the brooch we bought as souvenirs in Kohima. Instead of photographing it, I thought I would try sketching it, but on the spur of the moment, decided to give it a shot with paint – my first attempt at painting still life.
We travelled for three days on the crowded train – there were more than two hundred of us, and only a hundred confirmed tickets. A bus journey from Dimapur brought us to the campus of Nagaland University, located atop the hills, in Kohima. Exhausted after the journey, we didn’t bother about blankets, as we fell into deep slumber in the dormitory.
During our stay, we discovered the ‘passion fruit’. We devoured them like wild beasts. We had never heard of them, and we knew that we may never taste them ever again. By the time we left, the locals had made a handsome profit!
The nearby hangar served as the venue for talks and concerts. The music and dance performances mesmerised the large audience, and the atmosphere quite literally came alive when clouds filled the ‘auditorium’!
We had the privilege of attending workshops conducted by national artists. And the highlight of the entire trip was the ‘classical overnight’. Beginning after dinner, continuing till dawn, the all-night programme held us in a state of trance. We didn’t sleep during the concert, and yet, ‘woke up’ feeling refreshed, without a hint of exhaustion.
We spent the last day in the main town, visiting the War cemetery, and the Museum.
Due to the insurgent outfits operating throughout the North-Eastern Region, we were forbidden to travel at night. That meant that we had to reach Dimapur before sunset. The last night of our stay was spent on the railway platform at Dimapur Railway station.
We had to board the early morning train, which would stop only for fifteen minutes. We collected all the luggage in one place, and hauled every bit of luggage inside the train as fast as we could, irrespective of whose bag it was. After a chaotic hour or so, we found out that along with our baggage, two large boxes of RDX had found their way into the train. The train we boarded for our return journey was even more crowded than the one in which we went. The mood in the train was dull.
That didn’t last long, however, when we tasted the freshly cut pineapples that were being served by vendors in the train. Juicy and soft, they simply melted in the mouth, and there was not a hint of fibre – you could be forgiven for thinking that they were mangoes. The exotic produce of the north-east, it seemed didn’t end with the passion fruit!
Eventually, we bade farewell to all the people with whom we had shared our entire experience. People who were strangers only a few days back, and people whom we would probably never meet again.
It is unlikely we would ever be a part of such a trip, ever again.
We didn’t carry a camera to capture the great, and the not-so-great moments (and there were plenty of both!) Our stock of passion fruits lasted no more than a few days, and the trip became a distant memory, within just a few months. Looking back, it all seems like a dream. The details of the trip are blurry, and there is little record of us ever having been there. I never wrote anything about it, to remind me of the time.
However, we do have some proof of it being real – a pair of brooches that we bought as souvenirs.
And a painting.
This painting was made in Kohima. I had attended the workshop being conducted by Padma Shree Anjolie Ela Menon. Perhaps there was something in the air that made me draw this – I had never before drawn something abstract, and even after the trip, I have not dared to venture into that territory.
Upon returning, I discovered, to my horror, that the acrylic paint had actually not dried up, and the foam plate I had placed over the canvas to ‘protect’ it, got stuck, and ruined the painting.
Several months passed, and I never fixed it. After over four years, I finally painted over the bad patches. While the scars are still visible, the picture is more presentable.
I recently submitted my assignments for internal assessment (3D modelling, texturing and lighting). Here are the renders – the wire-frame, ambient occlusion, beauty pass, and composite. They have all been made using real images as references. The chocolate box took the most effort, and is, by far, the most original of the lot. Hope you enjoy!
After months of procrastination, we present to you, our creation. That the topic for this week’s photo challenge happens to be ‘create’, is a lucky coincidence!
The Project:
A 2d animated short film, being made for a student’s competition, on behalf of our institute.
The Concept:
Thumbnail story board extractAn extract from the story board
Theft of content discourages the the creators of original content. This, in turn, hinders creativity, and ultimately, when creation stops, everything comes to an end.
While this is rather extreme, we used it as the basis for creating our protagonist.
The Protagonist:
In search of our spirit
A formless spirit. People cannot see it, but it watches our every action. It has always existed in some form, but over the years it has grown exponentially. We needed a simple, yet mean creature. After unsuccessfully creating several rather cuddly creatures, we finally managed to locate our spirit.
The Plan:
Putting ideas to paper
We began with a simple story, with simple line art for presentation. It eventually grew more complicated, with more supplementary characters, and more complicated animation.
The Resources:
A lab – which we shared with five other students, two computers and a pen – tablet.
For the next three months, this room would virtually become our second home. We entered early morning and left late in the evenings – including Sundays. The windows were covered with black paper. The air-conditioning, at times, prevented us from suffocating, and at times made us shiver. The pen tablet came close to becoming my best friend!
The Human Resources:
We searched, and searched, and searched. We knew we needed a character artist. We found none. Eventually, we decided to handle it ourselves.
The Implementation:
Trying out animation – manually, and digitally
To create one second of an animated clip, we needed 24 frames. A software can make things move smoothly and blend frames, saving a lot of work. But it has its limitations. There are times, when everything must be done manually. For our story, every bit of animation involved manually creating unique frames.
Back when early Walt-Disney animations began appearing, there was no software which could blend and create frames. There was no copy and paste. The artists created each of the frames from scratch. The colours couldn’t be picked from a digital colour palette. They had to mix paints and inks for every frame. Yet they managed to create believable, realistic characters, which had a consistent form, and colour across every frame!
Where We Messed Up:
Trying to establish a styleStill trying to establish a style… Becoming a little complex
During the process, we fought. A lot – with each other and with our own teachers. We argued about the best approach towards solving issues. We lost a lot of time, just trying to figure out the style for the film – something that should actually have been a part of the planning stage. While we did do a lot of planning, our paper work was inadequate. It threw our schedule so far away, that our mentors, peers, and even we, began to lose hope of it even being completed. We lacked the foresight, and the skills which, we realised, were essential for taking on a project of this magnitude.
It seemed like our project had been set up to fail.
The Controversy:
Piracy is a sensitive issue, and a grey area. After all, sales of recorded music hardly account for an artist’s income. They benefit distributors. And artists earn millions from live concerts anyway. The concept seemed irrelevant for the digital age. The internet makes the cost of producing and distributing intellectual property almost negligible. A viral video on a video-sharing site is all it takes to get famous!
Ironically, we used music with creative commons licenses for our film on piracy!
At home, debates and arguments surrounding our project became a regular feature. My spending long hours working, only added to the gloomy atmosphere in the house.
The Final Touches:
With just about 3 weeks left, tension and tempers were rising. We asked Google for help. We analysed footage from videos, and animated clips. We searched for music, and shot footage of ourselves for reference. Desperate to finish what we started, we used videos and images as templates, and traced over them!
With just a couple of days left for the deadline, we had a few animations still left to do, and some of the backgrounds were incomplete. We had not compiled our work even once to check if all the pieces fit the puzzle. In a last ditch effort, we worked for 24 hours straight to complete the little bits. There were some glaring mistakes. But we ignored them. Ultimately, we rendered it – just in time for submission.
The title for our project was decided on the very last day!
Final shot – The pen tablet came close to becoming my best friend
The Aftermath:
The consequences of the marathon effort on my health were explained in detail in my previous post.
After nearly six months, we blew the dust from the project to fix some of the major glitches. During the rendering, our ghost showed up in a few frames, where we did not put it, and disappeared from some other frames. What can I say… It was being true to its nature.
The Perfect Monster:
The debate surrounding the definition of what constitutes piracy sparked a debate around our house, and divided the family. Several issues popped up during the planning and animation stage, which put some wonderful friendships in jeopardy. Our ghost didn’t help either. It distorted in unusual ways while animating, which caused a lot of head ache. It skipped frames on rendering, and appeared in places where it clearly didn’t exist. It ensured that we spent months, cooked up inside a sun-proofed room. While we brought packed lunch with us, it did not prevent us from eating out. Our health took a severe beating.
It seemed, that we had created the perfect monster.
The Other Side:
While we were blaming our creation for our troubles, the spirit was subtly doing its part to put us in our place! Working on the project, was a huge learning curve. We bit way more than we could chew, and that made us push our limits. We learnt the importance of pre-production, the importance of paper-work, the limitations of our skills, tricks to overcome it, the long road that lay ahead of us before we could even think about calling ourselves animators, how to work in a team (even if it was just the two of us), and to believe in ourselves, and our vision. Most importantly, we realised that nothing can ever be more important than our health.
We had to use every trick in the book to reel in the spirit which was running amok. I’m happy to report, that it has been caught and placed inside a container. It is on display as a video on Youtube. Its still not perfect, but considering that there were only the two of us, working on our very first animated clip, and practically the whole world betting against it, I think it turned out fine 🙂
Please visit the blog of my partner-in-crime, guilty of creating the monster!
The Disclaimer:
We admit we used a lot of references from the internet world. We have tried our best to give credit to our sources. Further, this project was not made for any commercial purposes. It was just an idea, which we feel extremely proud to be a part of, and hope you too enjoy it!
A few posts back I had written about spring and flowers. I had sketched out a hibiscus bud a few months back, and this month I drew the ‘loudspeaker lily’.
I folded a ‘half-imperial’ sized sheet and drew these on each half. They’re approximately 24 cm in width and 33 cm in height.
The elections for the municipal corporation were held today. Where there are elections, there is bound to be campaigning. So I too have jumped into the campaign mode. Albeit, of a different kind.
This year, as part of an internal competition, students were asked to make short films under various categories. I too was encouraged to participate.
I had no clue as to what I should do. But since the staff members wanted me to participate, I searched the internet world for some inspiration. After several days of wandering, out of sheer desperation, I decided to settle for a biography. It wasn’t the most original of ideas, and it wasn’t very interesting, but it was something. After discussing it with our teacher, I picked up the registration form and headed home.
The evening had set in, and I was sitting next to the window of the local bus. As the wind blew across my face, something happened. All of a sudden words streamed into my head. In a matter of a few minutes, I had a concept, a story, and even a vague picture in my mind.
I submitted my form on the very last day of the registration and over the next 4 weeks I set about executing it. And so, I am proud to present to you, Mr Paper.
This is an advertisement for a fictitious company named Papyres. The spelling mistake is intentional. I had intended it to be Papyrus, but after I had almost completed the animation, I searched, and found out that it was a real company. So I had to change it.
That brings me to the disclaimer – this video is a purely creative venture and not made for any commercial purposes.
So what does all this have to do with campaigning? Well, this video was short-listed for the viewers’ choice award. Yippee 😀 So now I have to get people to ‘like’ this video on Facebook. Being one of the rare breed of people not having such an account, I decided to post it here. So if anyone accidentally stumbles on to this blog, I hope you have a look at the video. Liking is not compulsory, but I do hope you enjoy it. I, for sure, enjoyed making it. 🙂
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For those interested in ‘liking’ it on Facebook, it is posted on this page:
Update: The competition ended in the video being nominated for the award. It was showcased during the cultural programme and award ceremony :). The response on the facebook page was overwhelming and I have a lot of people to thank for that! Thanks everyone! 🙂
Musings of an eccentric mind 