What’s 2019 for you? The year of ICC Cricket World Cup? Or the year of Loksabha Elections? With the latter, the political scenario of India is heating up everyday. Every parties are taking pot-shots at each other and even the news channels are not devoid of it – be it news anchoring, news stories or even political cartoons or ‘politoons’.
Been in vogue for a while now, one such politoon that is creating a stir for sometime now is OMG – Oh My God on IndiaTV from the house of Delhi based Tavrohi Animations.
Set up in September 2017 with a vision of combining masterful artistry, storytelling and amazing 3D animation technology, Tavrohi Animations is one of the very few studios who have achieved a lot in such a short span of time. The studio always wanted to become an artist and story driven animation studio responsible for creating some great animated content.
With a creative team consisting of strong experience and reputable body of work, Tavrohi Animations has a strong team of production managers, script writers, sound and visual effect experts, animators, modelers, lighting and texture artists, riggers, compositors and animation/production coordinators with a collective experience of over 150-man years.
This animation studio has been instrumental in creating the path breaking and award-winning television series OMG, Silly Point (spoofs of IPL), and the also the animated nominations of Best Actor (Male/Female) in the lately aired Star Screen Awards. But that’s not all! Recently Tavrohi Animations has been much appreciated for their work for designing the ‘Khelo India’ mascots – Jaya and Vijay.
Here’s our favourite picks of Tavrohi Animations’ creations :
1. OMG (Oh My God) – is a concept based show on animated political leaders characterised in a hilarious manner. Politics almost like show business, is emotive, has characters, caricatures and generally mimics a theatre. With OMG, Tavrohi Animations intends to capture all of it. It satirically captures events and personalities in a witty and original style and has successfully delivered over a 100 episodes running with great TRP’s on the news channels.
Speaking to AnimationXpress, Tavrohi Animations CEO Rohit Kataria commented, “Our team is a pioneer in Politoons on Indian television. This was the same team which started the first Politoons series few years ago. After its tremendous popularity, other news channels also started showing interest and were asking for similar content. So we developed OMG for India TV which is distinctly different, better in quality and of higher production value. Super quick turnaround times being our USP, we deliver a 90 second episode of OMG typically in four days from script to screen and we deliver about five to six episodes per month.”
OMG has been very popular within a very short duration and is growing day by day. We see it being shared across the social media by several politicians, official pages of political parties and others.
2. Animated nominations for Star Screen Awards 2018 – Tavrohi Animations has introduced animation with GEC channels. Currently doing a few spoofs based on film Stars for Star Screen Awards, they did the animated nominations for Star Screen Awards 2018 and the complete AR animation of the Stree character.
Made in 3D animation format, the idea was to bring the actors who never show up for the awards ceremony through animation. Kataria mentioned, “We have been seeing Star screen awards ceremony for over two decades and the show format has been more or less same. We were exploring some scope for animation in it, so we created a demo by ourselves and presented it to Star and they almost immediately really liked the idea… We wrote the draft scripts. Star’s creative team built up on them and we finalised on the scripts.”
Once the scripts are finalised, Tavrohi team started their research and collecting references to study the behaviours and persona of the characters. After the creative department took a call on the treatment and look of the animation, they created the guidelines, all the other teams started working in sync.
But it wasn’t that easy! As Kataria revealed, “Since we stylised the actors as caricatures, maintaining their resemblance was a big challenge. Especially with the female characters, achieving the look took several iterations and in animation the body language needed to be distinctly different from the male characters for it to be more convincing.”
As they say “all’s well that ends well”, the outcome was more than satisfying for them and much entertaining for us audience.
3. ‘Khelo India’ mascots – Tavrohi Animations created the adorable mascots- Vijay and Jaya for the ‘Khelo India’ School games. For the first time in India, these digitally animated mascots were the MC’s of the opening ceremony which was acclaimed by one and all including prime minister Narendra Modi.
“Looking at the scale of the games that was being organised, we developed idea and the characters in-house and created a demo and pitched it to the Sports ministry. They really liked the idea and the characters. It was the first time in the history of our animated mascots, Jaya and Vijay were the master of ceremonies at the Khelo India School Games opening which was inaugurated by Modi as well. Currently negotiations are on for Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs to acquire the IP of the mascots. We are currently delivering 22 Movies on ‘How to Play’ various sports based on these mascots to inspire children to take up sports,” added Kataria.
Apart from these, the IPL spoofs (Silly Point) was also hugely popular. They delivered 37 movies in the course of the 50 day tournament followed by a 30 minute show on the complete event telecast on Star Sports and Hotstar. The success of the format led to similar set of seven movies for Asia Cup and the Hockey World Cup.
The studio has also delivered a series of AV’s for National Institute of Rural development (NIRD) for their Gram Panchayat Development Programme (GPDP) through NFDC.
Presently, Tavrohi Animations is working on a 6K resolution animated show on Buddha possibly titled, Sarnath, which would be inaugurated by the PM later this year. Though Kataria didn’t give out too much details, the studio are in the process of starting a kids animated series conceived, conceptualised and created in-house of 104 episodes of 22 minutes each to be aired on a popular kids channel. They’re also starting a series of 12 X 50 minute animated movie series for OTT. The name of show and channel are under confidentiality.
With so much to their credit, Tavrohi Animations is moving ahead with commendable pace and we doubt if there are any other studios in the country have ventured into so many things in such a short time since its inception.