In a very interesting session at ABAI Fest & KAVGC Summit 2015, Thought Cloud Studio director production Vijayalakshmi NS took the audience in a journey behind the making of Rise of the Valiant Indrajeet. Till now all stories that have portrayed the epic of Ramayan have shown Ram as the protagonist and the righteous one in the tale. But a new story is soon to emerge from this Bengaluru based animation studio, which shows the triumph of a less known warrior, the son of Ravana and the defeater of Lord Indra.
The 30 minute 3D short film has been in production for nearly 1.5 years with maximum thrust on researching and pre production. “We referred to nearly 13 interpretations of Ramayana, Shiva Purana and Garuda Purana to understand about the protagonist of Rise of the Valiant Indrajeet – Meghanad, the son Ravana. He is an abstract character so we had to dig deep to know about him,” reveals Vijayalakshmi.
The story is about how Meghanad – prince of Lanka – defeats Lord Indra and captures him, earning him the title of ‘Indrajeet’. The movie will be a trilogy with the other two 30 minute films currently in production. While the first part only shows him achieving the title, the other two parts will show his rise to success, immortality and the fall of Indrajeet in the hands of Rama.
11 months were devoted to just understand Indrajeet’s character and how to bring to life the various fantastical thoughts to reality for today’s understanding such as Indrajeet’s ability to vanish and reappear as a form of ancient telepathy and maya and Indralok being positioned above the clouds as being the peak of the highest mountain. A renowned researcher Vailaku Mohandas led a team of about five people to get the facts right for the movie.
On the other hand, it took the team of 22 just eight months to create the animated movie. Vijayalakshmi says that Thought Cloud Studio creative director G Venugopal is much focused about what he wants. “Venu breaks a shot into tiny pieces. On an average, we have 3 seconds per shot which means nearly 75 frames for a shot. We had 640 shots for the film and this helped us get swift production.”
The original idea was to restrict it to just 22 minutes but the storyboard itself went to about 45 minutes but was finally cut down to 30 minutes during animatics. Another challenge the team faced was during rendering – which took more than four months due to various complications in the cloud server they were initially going to use.
Though Indrajeet originates from the dark side of mythological characters, the studio feels that one needs to appreciate the character for its qualities. “Indrajeet does sound like a villain because he defeated Ram and Lakshman during the Ramayan. But it can’t be ignored that he is a great warrior and one of the few atimaharathis,” adds Vijayalakshmi.
Pre-production research involved creating numerous weapons for the characters as well as various positions of each of the main characters.
