The first thing you notice when you enter Supari Studio’s office in Juhu Scheme, Mumbai, is that it does not look like an office, as much as it looks like home. A couple of steps from the doorway, and you enter the spacious hall, with a sofa and couch lined neatly on a side. However, what grabs your attention the most are the big frames on the wall with DC, Marvel, Star Wars and Death Note art. All signs of a very young studio.
The workplace that I visited was Post Office Studios, the sister company of Supari Studios. Founded in 2012 as a digital content studio, Supari Studios is run by a team of extremely young artists, creative thinkers, production managers and film-makers. Post Office Studios, the division which handles all the post-production work including animation and VFX, was started in September 2017.
“Post Office is focused on building proprietary processes to improve the process of creating visual effects and animated content,” said Aditya Tawde, who heads the division. “While we bring a wide range of capabilities from motion graphics and classical animation to visual effects and CGI, we are also further enhancing our capabilities in technology to build scalable and innovative tools for content creation.”
This is reflected in the variety of animated videos the studio has created. From lyric videos like Nike’s Da Da Ding and Dua Lipa’s New Rules, to The Rules of Kabaddi for Red Bull and Why Karo for public charitable trust Karo, one gets to see various animation styles. “These differentiated processes seek to improve the time and cost taken to develop new media content and automate core aspects to further drive scalability,” Tawde explained.
As a creative, bootstrapped business, the studio considers its people as the greatest asset. “It is with this in mind, that a lot of our focus is on finding ways to align our people’s personal and professional goals to that of the organisation.” WTFIGO (What The Fuck Is Going On) is a comprehensive 360 degree feedback session where organisational as well as life goals are discussed between employees and the founders.
As you enter each department of the studio’s office, it is difficult not to be distracted by the various figurines stacked on shelves and pop art frames lined neatly on the walls. The Yoda, Po, Groot, Deadpool, Batman, Wolverine, Baymax, Goku, Hulk, Eva and many more action figures sure make the place fascinating to say the least, nonetheless a constant inspiration to create indelible work.
“We believe that creativity can come from anywhere and hence diversity in thought plays a critical role,” Tawde shared. “In terms of a tactical process, we use sprints with design thinking principles to rapidly prototype ideas and test them.” One of their most recent original content properties, Vitamin Stree, was an outcome of their annual exercise Son of a Pitch, during which employees are divided into teams across passion points to deliberate and come up with new ideas and content pieces and/or a direction that the company should take.
In the last year and a half, Post Office has worked on 35 projects in various degrees of post-production with clients across Singapore, USA, UK and Indonesia. The studio’s Why Karo recently won the FICCI Frames BAF Award 2018 for best ad film in the Indian category.
With constant innovation, refreshing content and the pace at which the studio is growing, the next award doesn’t seem like a long way then, does it?