India’s Independence has been innovatively presented in an animated form by, ‘Ekabhuya’, makers of animation short ‘Kaccho Gadulo’, who yesterday have launched animated music video ‘Alchemy’ on YouTube as well as TV channel, Vh1 India.
Blended with Live Action, 2D and Rotoscopic Animation, this 5 minute animated video created on music track ‘Alchemy’ by Bandish Projekt, circles around assorted stories of Indian people, their hopes, aspirations and transformation.
So what has been the inspiration behind creating this animated music video?
Animationxpress.com’s Zeenia Boatwala catches up with Ekabhuya team- Pranay Patwardhan, Shivangi Ranawat, Janmeet Singh and they share, “India is a colorful nation and the spread of colors was our simile of Indian life that includes progress, change, conflict, symbiotic existence and India’s giant leap towards progress, which we wanted to portray in an animated format.
Explaining more on the song selection, they inform, “Bandish Projekt’ is very well known for their cutting edge and unique music that is a blend of Indian folk and electronic. We loved their music and were given the opportunity to create the official music video for their new track ‘Alchemy.”
It was in March this year that this time kick started work on ‘Alchemy’ and shot the video on Bangalore streets, in markets and gardens.
Informs more, “After hearing the musical track we started to brain storm, storyboard and search locations and finally made a decision to choose Bangalore for commencing our shoot.”
The team shot numerous footages and made a library of it by capturing people and locations and then went on to illustrate edit and animate the footage.
Shares more, “‘Alchemy, kept evolving and progressing with a combination of various ideas. We had a great time shooting with ‘Shane Solanki’ (aka Last Mango in Paris) the poet and performer in the video, and this in turn blended all our visuals together for creating a proper flow and story.”
The team feels that this video is a great way to have connected the realistic locations and situations with a surreal, abstract, colorful and dreamlike setting and consider the musical track itself a motivating factor for creating this video.
Not only the music track, but there were other driving factors too that revolved around showing the life of a modern Indian .For making the animation look right, the team made extensive research on Indian art, spirituality, traditions, values and the modern Indian growth with respect to IT, the mall culture and progress.”
Talking more about the pre-production, the team shares, “We divided the track into parts and then worked on it. We had a basic flow with the storyboard of how the actions would flow and situations would evolve, which was refined intuitively during the production.”
The kicking aspects of this video for the team are its flow, transition and achieving the right balance was also crucial to convey the story.
Reveals more, “The prime challenges were portraying the ideas of this song in a way that the audio and video complemented each other with composing transitions and creating combination of live-action, animation and time lapse, and we believe that it has come out as the most unique point of this video.”
Coming to the technologies used for making this video, the team made use of, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Aftereffects and Adobe Premier for executing animations and editing.
“This video has been a collaborative and magical experience. From the initial idea and song, the process of making the video has given everyone involved (the music and visual artists) a new meaning for ‘Alchemy’, its thoughts and feeling.” concludes, Ekabhuya.