Want to make learning fun? Animation is a great option.
Mumbai based animation studio, Lumen Phon Multimedia Pvt. Ltd. has recently completed animation for an animated Indian nursery rhyme series called Karadi Rhymes 1 and 2. The series will be realeased in two volumes, each containing ten songs sung by Usha Uthup, towards the end of August on CD ROM.
The project made for the children’s book company, Karadi Tales Company took four months to be completed by a team of six artists. The songs on the CD are animated with sing along titles to make it interactive with games as well, targeted at children above the age of four. Initially 3000 SKUs are planned to be sold with additional units being sold as per the market response.
Having been around for twelve years, Lumen Phon has created games and cel animation for Mitashi Edutainment Pvt. Ltd, a 2D game called Monkey and the Crocodile and projects for BBC and L&T among others.
Karadi Tales Company was established in 1996 and has been into audio book publishing since then. This is the publisher’s second animation CD venture. The first one was in 2002 when the studio released “The Foolish Lion” and “Karadi Junior”, the animation for which was done by Lumen Phon as well.
Comparing the two projects, Shantanu Bhattacharjee, Director, Lumen Phon shared with Animation Xpress, “In the earlier series we used classical cel animation techniques with every cel being drawn manually by the artists, scanned and then traced and inked on softwares like animo and us animation. This required extensive use of man power. The negative side of this was because of too much detailing, the computer programme (Director and flash which were the final output domain) could not render them on the fly and started losing sync in different users PCs.”
“For Karadi Rhymes 1 and 2, we used simpler technique with lesser details. Moreover the PCs by then became more powerful. The second series used more of animatics unlike animation of the first one,” he added.
Rajalaxmi, Administrative Manager, Karadi Tales Company, added “Our purpose behind creating Karadi Ryhmes 1 and 2 was to make them interactive while making the children listen to music at the same time”
The concept for a compilation of animated nursery rhymes was thought about for a long time by the team at the Karadi Tales Company. Given that music is the mainstay and song remains the easy route to learning, it posed to be an attractive concept. They wanted to move away from the usual and several times repeated rhymes and create something that had a local flavor to it, hence Karadi Rhymes 1 and 2 was born.