An animation film, the first one from Sikkim

An animation film, the first one from Sikkim, is in pre-production.

An Animation Workshop has brought a group together at the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology for the past three weeks to develop a folk tale from the state into a five minute long animation film.  The team that has been established for this project includes eight young thangka art students who are creating the artwork with the aim of giving the film a unique look inspired by the beautiful thangka art of the region.  Six of the students are in their third year of a four year course, while the other two, Purna and Birbal, will graduate this year.
 
The team also includes several animators from the National Institute of Design and various other institutes of animation.  Some are particularly interested in drawing cartoons and caricatures and they have gravitated towards designing the characters for the film, while others are competent on software such as Maya, Flash and Adobe After Effects and are providing the technical inputs into the production. 
Having written a script for the story based on a Lepcha folk tale and then visualised the film scene by scene as a storyboard, the team are finishing the Animatic (filmed storyboard) and they are also working on a promo that will give a good indication of the look and pace of the film.  It promises to be a beautiful production, with landscapes from the mountainous state and all the right cultural details.

The animation novices are also having a go at doing some test sequences of their own using plasticene and cut out puppets.  Tara Douglas, coordinator of the workshop on behalf of the Adivasi Arts Trust,explained that while computers are a very useful tool, animation has been done at an expert level by hand long before computers became the norm.
A Sikkimese based design collective, Echostream is providing all the local support for the project.

The workshop has received support from the Commonwealth Foundation and from INTACH (UK)
11.3.2010

For more information contact:

Tara Douglas, Adivasi Arts Trust
tarapurnima@hotmail.com