Vaibhav Studios had a funny yet relatable video as a gift for Valentine’s Day! After its Samosa and Vada Pav rap ident for Indian kids broadcaster, Nickelodeon garnered tremendous response on social media, the studio revealed its recent ident ‘Train’ to celebrate the day of love!
Produced by Vaibhav Studios, the new ‘Train’ ident is supercool and will resonate very well with audiences across the country, especially those who travel by train on a daily basis. The concept itself is a fresh one after its amazing stints with food items.
Said co-director and animator at Vaibhav Studios, Dapoon Rai Dewan, “For the next or upcoming idents, Nickelodeon wanted us to do something other than food animation. Hence we started brainstorming a few ideas and finally hit upon animating the letters from the logo itself. I personally wanted to do something on romance and was wondering if we could pair up the two N’s. Also because in the logo, the two N’s are at either ends of the word with the rest of the alphabets filling in, it seemed to me like the other letters had separated them from each other. Based on this basic idea, we brainstormed a few stories and somehow the local train concept clicked!”
The 32 second clip gives an interesting picture of how local train passengers struggle to find their feet in the train (quite literally), during peak hours which include couples too. The animation is real, engaging and clearly shows the toil and passion behind executing the concept brilliantly.
The team at Vaibhav Studios usually lock the story first and then gets down to pre production, followed by storyboard and animatic to have the basic flow of the film in mind. The characters are designed and the style of the animated film is finalised. Once the preproduction is locked, the characters and the sets are modeled in CGI and textured.
“We chose to go the minimalistic way with limited colour schemes so that our characters could stand out. The next stage is rigging, of the characters’ design and movement that includes a lot of to and fro between the animators and the riggers on nailing it down. They have done an excellent job in creating super flexible rigs for the main characters despite the limitations in their design. We also created a separate rig for N’s tube like shape during the dance and switched it with the main rig whenever required.
Once that is done, we get into animation. Here we animated the character on 2’s with quick snappy, cartoony movements. I must mention that the last shot was quite a challenge for us to get it right. With so many characters flushing inside a compact space, we wanted the feeling of being stuck inside a local train or bus with everyone stacked up against each other. The animators worked with the riggers to create blend shapes and even resorted to animating the vertices on every individual character to achieve that look, and lock the final frame of that shot. Then they animated the shot backwards.
After animation, the lighting artists step in to create the mood of the scene, and finally the shots are rendered and comped. I would also like to mention our music director Roto Shah who has single handedly done the entire background score and foley, and has done a tremendous job!,” further added Dewan about the process.
The craftspeople behind this animated video are :
Concept and Story
Dapun Rai Dewan and Vaibhav Kumaresh
Direction
Dapun Rai Dewan, Ajit Aher and Vaibhav Kumaresh
Music and sound design
Roto Shah
Technical direction
Bhavesh Gondaliya
Character Design
Dapoon Rai Dewan
Storyboards and Animatic
Dapoon Rai Dewan
Modeling
Tapas Jana, Bhavesh Gondaliya
Texturing
Avinash Gulhane and Rajib Debnath
Rigging
Abhijit Ghodke, Bhavesh Gondaliya and Amlan Sarkhel
Camera Layout
Tapas Jana
Animation
Ajit Aher and Dapoon Rai Dewan
Lighting and compositing
Sagar Kulkarni and Jayesh Panchal
Production manager – Sweta Nayak
Studio assistance – Baadal Chaurasiya
Team Nickelodeon India –
Suchita Karmokar (Vice President, Creative Services, Kids Cluster)
Sanhita Das (Creative Director, On Air Promotions, Kids Cluster)
These series of unique, funny and innovative animated content always bring a smile and a breath of fresh air.
