Asifa India Chapter

Animated Short

Client

Asifa India

Role

Co-Direction
Animation

Year

2020

This project was an exercise in collaboration from home at the time of a pandemic. On the eve of International Animation Day (October 28th), ASIFA International releases an animated video. For 2020, the theme was Spiritus Mundi for which animators from Australia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Finland, Greece, India, Iran, Switzerland and USA collaborated. The India Chapter was created by students of NID Andhra Pradesh, under mentors Sekhar Mukherjee and Vani Saraswathi Balgam.

ASIFA (Association Internationale du Film d’Animation) was founded in 1960 in Annecy, France as an association of individual animation artists. Today ASIFA can be described as an international network of numerous local ASIFA Chapters, which have developed their own local identities and special activities.
For the India Chapter, the brief was to highlight various aspects of the visually rich and diverse culture.

The project began open-ended. To save the trouble and time of going around in circles, I proposed a simple structure. R. Kaushal created an amazing soundtrack based on this structure giving us more traction to animate on.

To give the final edit cohesion, I proposed the circular form inspired from Asifa India's logo to be the lietmotif.

Moodboard from an initial pitch-deck.

Much of India's natural vibrancy can be owed to it's diverse flora. This would become the subject for my section.

Having figured out the overall narrative, timeline, sequence and transitions, the next stage was of production.
The blooming effect was created using an algorithm which birthed a number of points on a curve. Every frame, the points moves away from the origin. Upon reaching the end of the curve, they spawn at the start again.

The brief demanded a 4k render. Owing to hardware limitations, I had to use the much faster realtime render engine EEVEE, by breaking down each flower into an alembic for ease of texturing and further timing.

Credits