Creative Gaga - Jan/Feb 2013 (Preview)

Jan/Feb 2013

creative

` 200/www.CreativeGaga.com

VOL3/ ISSUE1

Jan/Feb 2013 the enthusiastic creative journal

Animation Possibilities by

Bala

Industry Leaders Discuss

How Indian is Indian animation?

JasMinder Oberai shares landscape photography tips

The makin g of animated short film ‘Bhavri’ by Sonia Tiwa ri r, ove . c is d f th chpa o gic or tou a s, e m ne on cti . tru rtpho ru ge

This symbolises the ‘Virtual Interactive Content’, which can be accessed with ‘Layar App’.

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Contents EXHIBIT

GYAAN

08____TrendFeed Inspiring design with potential to be influential.

58____Short ‘n’ Sweet/ Sonia Tiwari The animation filmmaker takes us through the process of creating an animated short film.

12____NewsFeed Recently concluded creative events.

18____SpendThrift Thoughtfully designed stuff that you can acquire.

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62____Vocal Visual/ Jugal Shah The graphic designer explains how visuals lend a voice to the identity of the brand.

20____TechFeed First look at recently launched tech products.

66____Luminous Landscape/ Jasminder Oberai The photographer shares insights to keep in mind while shooting the beautiful world.

FIGURES

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24____Tickling Interpretations/ Alicia Souza The designer infuses humour into the most mundane things to turn them into sources of delight and laughter.

74____Complementing Caricatures/ Pradeep Soni Idiosyncratic characters and complementary stories are two sides of the same coin, believes the animator.

30____Canvas Conscious/ Ruchi Shah The illustrator explores the relationship between the form and the medium it is employed for.

75____Aesthetics Amalgamated/ Rayika Sen The illustrator incorporates traditional aesthetics with modern sensibilities to illustrate visual stories.

34____Character Chronicles/ Abhishek Singh The artist and graphic novelist charts out few tenets of character design, which when put together help the story evolve.

40____Wise Advise/ Indigenous Narratives Leading industry practitioners discuss issues about Indian animation.

44____People Possibilities/ Balasubramanian Each one of us is a reservoir of stories. If explored well, they can open up a multitude of narrative possibilities, believes the animation filmmaker.

50____Tracing Time/ Kriti Chaudhary The ceramic artist attempts to capture the changes of time and nature.

52____Speaking Strokes/ Ashwin The designer reveals how the meaning of every stroke combines to get the final picture talking.

76____Visual Connections/ Sameer Kulkarni Right visuals connect viewers and cultures across boundaries, believes the illustrator and animator.

DESIGN PLEASURE 80____Native Narrative/ Ek Karkhana The apparel design house narrates Indian stories by capturing the inherent beauty of traditional arts and crafts.

82____Flexible Fragility/ Pratyusha Venugopal Fragility evolves into flexibility if supported with sensible and intelligent designs, believes the paper quilling artist.

84____Open Imagination/ Fan Club Selected picks for the latest issue from our Fan Club submissions.

90____Comic Frame Contest Top picks from the recently held contest on our Facebook page.

FIGURES_GagaWorthy

Canvas

Conscious The illustrator reflects on how illustration changes or retains form as it travels from one medium to another.

Ruchi Shah studied advertising from Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai, followed by a Masters in Visual Design (M.Des) from IDC, IIT-B. She has been a visiting Charles Wallace Fellow to Camberwell College of Arts.

Currently, she works as a freelance illustrator based out of Mumbai.

While the canvas becomes the message, illustration becomes the medium. The job of a canvas is to effectively communicate the purpose of illustration. At the same time, illustration is a fitting medium that communicates the purpose of design. Together, they allow a designer to look at things from unlikely angles, allowing one to economise resources and break distinctions. This makes illustration a hybrid of different disciplines like art, craft, architecture and photography. Thus, narrating pictorial stories of the constantly evolving world.

Stories happen through connections.

Whether literal, physical or humorous, it is the connection that makes the style complement the idea.

Space-agnostic illustrations are more skill-driven than conceptually steered. Thereby making the style of illustration following the idea. In such cases, the key is to know what can and what can’t be achieved through your form. The possibilities and limitations often declare the idea. Once you know your style well, it becomes easy to explore your idea further.

In the artwork, ‘The World through my Window’, the idea is a jumble of what has caught the illustrator’s fancy while travelling, expressed through a pop-art-ish route. The messy, clean and cozy windows that she observed kicked off the visual approach in her mind. The approach took inspiration from her cluttered workspace that is always scattered with curios, boxes, containers and papers. All these objects rearranged themselves to create the visual. With small niches and spaces it worked perfectly as big or small windows and buildings. The artwork is buzzing during the day, but actually comes alive at night. Being created with a mixture of coloured semi-transparent papers, it can be lit up during the night > 01

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Jan/Feb 2013 01/02 The World Through My Window. Poster for an annual competition held by Association of Illustrators.

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FIGURES_GagaWorthy

03/04/05/06 The Rainmaker.

Illustration for a children’s book.

07 Purestone.

Entrance graphics for a London based agency.

08/09 Book Cover. For the children’s book Grimms Fairy Tales.

The medium tells you what to do.

An illustrator should let the form of illustration take shape according to what the medium allows it to do. This essentially means one needs to know the medium well. Does it bend? Does it fold? Where does it want to go? What does it refuse to do? The answers to these questions determine how one should go about the form, using the chosen medium. Keep exploring, make mistakes, characterise these errors and finally, build on some of them. The enhancement of the imperfections sometimes becomes the key to making a perfect visual.

The brief was to design the entrance of Purestone – a London-based digital marketing agency’s office. Part of a rebranding project, it was done in collaboration with Kyle Henderson. The 25ft x 10ft long space, had to be attention grabbing for potential clients, giving the office a strong identity. The style of both the designers on the project had a lot of detailed and bold line

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work, making it possible for occasional overlapping.

Incorporating the window with a view of urban London that sat exactly in between the space, a visual was created that complemented style of both the illustrators on the project. As the space had a lot of geometrical niches and corners, a seamless graphic was preferred to run across it. The style nicely adjusted to the scale of the space and was received enthusiastically by the onlookers.

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Expertise is to know how to give context to everything.

Of course, knowledge and skill remain irreplaceable.

But expertise also comes with awareness that anything and everything can be used to express yourself. Either by essence or by form, if materials are captured and framed with singular or multiple contexts, brilliant results can be achieved. Turning snags into starting points for constructing the visual and keeping a balance between pausing and exaggeration define it. Unlearning trumps learning and knowledge of that facilitates expertise.

For the project, ‘The Rainmaker’, different skills were combined into one installation, where everything remained substituted. The fabric turned into rain, plastic pipes poured out paper puddles and real people became mere props. The idea was a transition between a sense of reality to conceptual and stylized depictions. The archetypal British summer was the inspiration behind creating the visual around rain, which the designer literally attempted to ‘make’. This was justified with a screen-printed fabric on which it was raining cats, dogs, fish, alligators etc., giant paper-cut ‘water’ and an intricately hand crafted umbrella, creating an image of the urban world above it, using mundane materials such as black strings and wires and things found in everyday life. This carefully arranged scene was a full-blown installation, letting people take the centre stage.

Sum up to your talent everyday, every moment.

Learning and exploring are the two essential ways by which you can keep moving forward. Achieve that through travelling, developing new habits, observing anything and everything, miscellaneous conversations, following the trends in nature and the haphazardness of our responses to those trends. A culmination of all of these will be exemplified in your work <

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Gyaan Get your hands on new software skills and creative techniques with a host of inspirational design guides. Industry’s leading professionals share tips and tricks to create better designs.

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58____Short ‘n’ Sweet/ Sonia Tiwari

Take a ride through the beautiful journey of making an animated film.

62____Vocal Visual/ Jugal Shah

Find out what magic can a regular visual do for a brand.

66____Luminous Landscape/ Jasminder Oberai

Take down few points for a better landscape clicks.

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Podium They are the new breed of creative minds who are going to take the industry by storm. Catch them while they talk about their philosophies and methods as they stop over on their way to the top.

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74____Complementing Caricatures/ Pradeep Soni

Discover a world of simplification and exaggeration, spoken through quirky caricatures.

75____Aesthetics Amalgamated/ Rayika Sen

Watch how integration of traditional art forms helps create a new visual language.

76____Visual Connections/ Sameer Kulkarni

Discover how visuals break barriers to become universally communicative.

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GYAAN_MakeBelieve

Short 'n' Sweet It’s a long way from an idea to a film. Particularly when you are creating your characters, environment etc. and then animating everything to come up with a nice narrative. Animation filmmaker Sonia Tiwari experienced that journey while making the short film ‘Bhavri’. She explains the process.

01 Storyboard and Animatic Assuming that a solid story and basic character descriptions are in place, the first and foremost helpful thing in animation is a series of storyboards to visually put together the shots in progression. An animatic is putting storyboards on the editing timeline along with corresponding sound effects, voiceover and dialogue. It helps in getting an idea of timing, pacing, acting choices etc., which are very essential for animation.

02 Shot Analysis Each shot must have a motivation. Before animation begins one must know the background story of characters, their body language, emotions, physical action, what needs to be conveyed in this shot and what is the time limit for the shot etc. If the shot needs to be for only 4 seconds, we need to cut down on the amount of physical action and make sure there is just enough animation to convey the emotions clearly.

03 3D Animatic If one has a 3D animation pipeline, it’s important to begin with a 3D animatic or pre-viz reel, where we assemble all 3D assets such as models, rigged characters, stage setting, props, lights, textures etc. and block all the camera angles. This helps in animating to camera, making one only animate stuff visible in the renderable camera, instead of animating everything there is in the scene. An important tip is to ‘reference’ all 3D assets in the scene, instead of importing them, so that it is easy to update modifications made to original assets.

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Jan/Feb 2013

Sonia Tiwari Sonia Tiwari is a filmmaker with an MFA in Animation from Academy of Art University, San Francisco. Her design aesthetic is inspired by Indian motifs and bold colours.

Brief To create an animation film basis a children’s story. To give the film an authentic Indian feel, yet making it universal.

Tools used • Maya • Photoshop • After Effects • Premiere • Soundbooth

04 Animation Thumbnails Animation thumbnails can be inspired by the storyboard, but here is where the animator really breaks down the animation and plans out the use of animation principles like weight, anticipation, exaggeration, timing, pacing etc. Using video reference, acting out in front of mirror, noting down the timing etc are all great resources to draw thumbnails from.

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GYAAN_MakeBelieve

05 Animation Blocking This is the first step in taking all the previous animation homework and putting it into the scene. In a 3D pipeline, many animators block the animation with a stepped tangent (used in Maya), block holds and get the timing as accurate as possible. This is where all the ‘key-poses’ are blocked out and in most cases all body parts are keyed together. Nothing is offset as of now, just to get a neat view of the overall action. Some animators find it easier to use spline tangents (used in Maya) right from the blocking stage.

It all depends on individual convenience.

06 Animation First and Second Pass This is where we layer in details in the blocking. For example, if a character is jumping and landing, both feet won’t land at the same time, they will now be offset.

While in blocking we only blocked the key poses, now is the time to offset, add in-betweens, expressions etc. It’s all about getting the emotion right and balancing holds with motions.

07 Feedback Cycle Ask your fellow animators or seniors for feedback, fix the shots, ask for feedback again and again till the fixing is finally done. One must also know the overall production deadline to know when to stop taking feedback and hit the render button. No shot is done 100% but it needs to be good enough for the production schedule and project requirement.

08 Final Animation Accumulating all feedback and references, fixing and layering details in animation, bringing it as close to the director’s vision as possible, letting it go through post-production process and making it fit just right in the overall sequence, makes a shot final <

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PODIUM_15mmofFame

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Pradeep Soni Animator

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Complementing Caricatures

Caricatures work on simplification and exaggeration. The features that make a character unique are exaggerated and the rest, simplified. Caricatures not only go a long way in supporting the story, but add to the depiction of expressions and moods with crispness. Animator Pradeep Soni’s key to scripting complementary caricatures are his intended perspectives and keen attention to detail.

01 Babaji.

A quirky character and animation was chosen as a medium to promote UTV Bindaas’s identity. Inspired by a pre-written script and Indian Sadhu stereotype, the simplified yet exaggerated design was met with composed geometry, animal resemblance and an analogous colour scheme. This, while tallying with the brand essence, brought out the humour in the frame.

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02 Ramatiya.

The 3D animation film speaks of a love triangle between woundup toys. The aesthetics of the film are inspired from Rajasthan.

The short film’s simple yet exaggerated characters, idiosyncratic design and likeability in terms of form, colour and composition, together contribute in a touching and engaging story.

03 Macabre.

It is primarily inspired by two films - Hotel Transylvania and ParaNorman. The simplified yet exaggerated Macabre is met with stereotypical horror and a murky colour scheme. The quirky caricature of the character complements the story that is being narrated <