‘Clouds’ has won the Asifa Excellence Award in BEST STUDENT – 3D ANIMATED FILM Category at Asifa India 2013. This 3D Animation Short, created by Stephanie Birat and Nikita Deshpande, Animation students from DSK Supinfocom India, targets kids of all ages as well as the grownups who value the concept of imagination.
- Stephanie Birat
Expressing thrill on winning at Asifa India, Stephanie and Nikita, share their thoughts with AnimationXpress.com, “Winning at Asifa India 2013 is a great achievement as we had put a lot of efforts, time and imagination for making this short simple and creative at the same time.”
The story line of this short revolves around a Crab, who as the story progresses, makes the audience enter an imaginative world in which several creatures of nature like vegetables, birds, fishes interact with each other and human beings appear as a guest .
Sharing more on the story line, the Directors, say, “’ the concept of ‘Clouds’ is adopted from the random and creative imagination of kids.”
- Nikita Deshpande
The short, divided into three parts, shows an introduction to the new world of creatures in which the characters are seen having the human element of emotions like anger, fear and happiness. In the second part, there’s a shift to an adventurous journey in which a crab tries to save the carrots. And as kids can get really dark in their imagination, the last part highlights the danger scenes.
Stephanie and Nikita chose different Color textures to bring out different moods in this short. In the opening scenes of the short, Bright colors were used to match the nature of innocence and craziness whereas colors like black and white were used for showing crab in danger, which we see towards the climax.
“As the imagination process of the kids is not proportionate and limitless, we analysed different ways of storytelling, researched on how to simplify the Character sketches of the animals, vegetables and how to rig the characters.”, highlights more.
On the software front, Adobe Photoshop was used for Texturing, After Effects for Composition, Premiere for Editing, and Autodesk Maya. On asking the Directors on why did they prefer to make used of 3D medium instead of 2D?
“3D gives better freedom with the camera movement, the lighting and the textures.”
Stephanie and Nikita spent a month for finalizing on the concept, story, script and character designs. Creating Animatics took around 1 ˝ month and 9 months were put into production and post production.
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