Haptics a short film created by Mumbai based Futurethought has been adjudged best animated short film at the prestigious Hollywood Discovery Awards. This success adds to the gold rush that Indian animated short films have been experiencing of late.
The 5-minute film depicts characters that live in a time when machines are efficient, reality is virtual and ‘the human touch’ is out of reach. Haptics takes us into a surreal world which is mechanical in every sense and shows the interaction of computers and people. It deals with a futurist couple and their over reliance on the machines of their time.
The movie took almost a year to be completed and was worked on by thirty five artists including story, design, sound, music, voice, modeling, rigging, lighting and animation artists as well those involved in editing and managing the production through various phases.
An elated Steve Kasper, Director of Business Development, Future Thought told Animation Xpress.com, “This is a big honour for the people who have worked on this project and it helps validate the position of the company as a creative producer. It gives us a strong platform to build upon. We are just finishing up another internally generated short that we feel very god about and maybe that will be an even bigger winner next year. We hope to make sure people realize that there are some very good storytellers in India and that Future Thought has the vision to bring them to the forefront of the Industry, both in Asia and internationally.”
“Haptics was created internally by the team at Future Thought. It began as a seed of a concept and several people contributed to its development making not only the company proud but Indian animation as a whole. In fact, the beauty about Haptics is that the entire concept, screenplay, design, story, sound, voice, music, animation, post production was carried out at the studio in India. That in itself is a great achievement since creating original content in India has always been a difficult task! I would more than anything credit the company’s vision and culture of creating, developing and building a library of award and audience-winning content for an achievement such as this!” he added.
CEO Jay Zaveri shared, “Making short films is a great way to build confidence, pipelines and experience into the team. I would like to thank the team at Future Thought that worked on Haptics for creating a wonderful film that is both entertaining as well as provocative. The team at Future Thought has consistently excelled in the true spirit of creating a company that develops award and audience-winning content.”
The Mumbai based studio which has a front end in the US too, has previously worked on Walt Disney’s Buzz on Maggie, Warner Bros’ Coconut Fred’s Fruit Salad Island, MTV’s Immies, a series of character animated shorts called OzieBoo!, among others.