Mythology with a stop motion feel is in full swing with Handmade Animation Studio’s debut, 44 minuter; mythological stop motion full length feature film titled ‘Ashur Binasini’.
With the aim of spreading the presence of stop motion in India to a grander level, Amit Patel, founder of Handmade Animation Studio and Director of ‘Ashur Binasini’ has many plans to contribute to the stop motion market of India with this movie.
Amit has completed his Animation Film Making Course from ZICA Mumbai. He has worked at Adams Apple Entertainment at Nagpur as a Director and Modeler on a stop motion film and also been a Mentor at Arena Animation Chowringhee.
Produced by Handmade Animation Studio, ‘Ashur Binasini’ revolves around the story of “Maa Durga” vanquishing the tyranny of the demon King Mahishasura.
According to the team at Handmade Animation, this movie is not about gain or loss, good or evil but about the ultimate power of unity against the blessing which morphs into curse of destruction and the movie is an appealing token to the audience, which is crafted keeping all the ritual aspects in mind. The story of ‘Ashur Binasini’ is from the villain, antagonist, ‘Mahishasura’s point of view.
Handmade Animation Studio started working on this short film in 2011 and is currently focusing on the post-production of the movie.
Speaking to Animationxpress.com’s Zeenia Boatwala about Ashur Binasini, Amit Patel, Founder, shares, “We needed a strong storyline along with an audience entertaining plot. Handmade believes in welcoming different genres of concept.
For our first project, we chose a mythological story because we wanted the audience to relate to the concept and also get to see the quality of stop motion animation technique which our studio offers.”
A team of 20 artists are working on the movie and it has taken around 4 months to complete the pre-production. To finalize the plot of ‘Ashur Binasini, Amit along with his team have researched on various mythological stories, met many various people from Kolkata to know more about the old mythological stories and also took advice from Pandits of Kolkata.
Amit adds, “My team brought the idea of planning a stop motion feature film on Maa Durga and was very curious to see the way stop motion and mythology match with Maa Durga and Mahishasura.”
Coming to the production process, all the characters in the movie are made with GM Foam Latex for bringing out the stop motion and around 7 months have been taken to complete the production of the movie. For capturing animation we the team has used Dragon Frame Stop Motion Software.
Amit informs, “I could have made use of clay but avoided it because, it’s very difficult to manipulate various actions using clay and thought it would be easy to use Latex instead.”
Initially the movie was given Bengali voice overs, but then it was dubbed in Hindi for catering to the mass audience. All the dialogues and script of the movie is written by Sudenshna Dutta and Subhasish Dutta, who is the co-writer of the movie and the Hindi translation of the dialogues is executed by Gita Mukerjee.
“Mythological stories are all time popular among all age group. And India being a country of traditions, made us not to limit our audience. I thought to take ‘Ashur Binasini’ to a larger audience rather than keeping it regional and hence we made a swift decision to dub it in Hindi Language.” asserts, Amit.
Amit is planning to release the movie on leading cartoon entertainment channels by July this year and is in talks with various broadcasters for the same. Also, Amit feels that stop motion is rarely seen in Indian Animation Market due to lack of production and publicity.
With ‘Ashur Binasini’, Indian animators and audience will be motivated and will look upto Stop Motion as a friendly medium.
To know more about Amit, you can check out his blog by visiting https://amit1pk.wordpress.com/about/ and can also visit the official website of Handmade Animation Studio by clicking on http://www.handmadeanimationstudio.com/
