With the passion of creating something entertaining for the audiences, Sagar Kadam’s animated short film ‘Lubdhanam Cora’, a 5 ˝ minuter 3D Animated short film, has made India proud with its win at 14 TBS DIGICON 6 AWARD in the Digicon 6 Creativity Awards Category and Best Short film in the Asian Regional Awards category and also has recently bagged an award at the SpoofhMania Film Festival.
Till date, ‘Lubdhanam Cora’ has received huge success at the coveted animation awards and film festivals including Winner of TASI Viewer’s Choice Awards 2012 India in Independent Professional Category, Special Jury Award mention in professional category of ASIFA INDIA Award 2012 and also Nominated for SIGGRAPH Asia 2012 Computer Animation Festival.
Sagar has worked as a Character Animator at Pixion Studios and contributed to several projects including animated movie ‘Mahayoddha Ram’, ’Freej’, a CG TV Series and AD Films for Reliance Mobile ,BSC, Limca, Soneer Veneer. He has been the VFX Animator for feature films titled No Smoking, Sunday, Victoria 203 and executed character animation for Toonpur ka Superhero.
‘Lubdhanam Cora’ is written, directed and produced completely by Sagar. Targeted at audiences of all age groups, the story of ‘Lubdhanam Cora’, revolves around an overambitious greedy whose greed lands him in a series of misadventures with a car.
Speaking to Animationxpress.com’s Zeenia Boatwala about the key motivation behind this short film, Sagar Kadam, Writer and Director of the Short Film, says, “LUBDHANAM CORA means a GREEDY thief and the title is taken from ancient language SANSKRUT. My main motive behind this film was to make something entertaining for the audience, rather than something grim, which has always been my vision.
I have always felt that anything artistic, even if it was just one character or an object, should leave an impact on the viewers mind such that the next time they think about that subject, they would relate to this particular piece of art.”
According to Sagar, the USP of ‘Lubdhanam Cora’ is the way a single character takes control of the entire story and makes it happening and loved by the audiences. He also feels that people, who are willing to make their own short films, should make a proper plan for executing their short film.
Sagar asserts, “Everyone has their own idea with a good story. One shouldn’t think much about the resources and instead should start working on their idea. I believe, if you really have the dedication and enthusiasm for your work, resources will automatically come to you.”
It has taken 3 years for Sagar to complete the entire short film and he has done the entire matte paintings for the film. For executing the color treatment for ‘Lubdhanam Cora’, Sagar had numerous color concepts fixed in his mind and implemented it well for giving a cartoony look and feel to the overall short film.
Adds more, “As I’m already from an art background, I was quite clear about the kind of work needed for the film and hence I developed the matte paintings accordingly. I’ve done the entire art work of my film.”
Sagar has taken around two months for working on the concept and script of this short film and finalized on the gags during the pre-production of the film. “As soon as I finished up with my script, I had a group discussion with my team to improvise the script more and bring it at its best.”
For choosing the locations for the short film, Sagar captured photographs of various locations and then executed the storyboarding and 2D Animatics and also he and his team didn’t get on with the production until they had a clear and firm pre-production plan in their mind.
Coming to the Animation for the short film, each animator in the team had preplanned the shot with varied acting ideas and gestures to be applied to the character and then the team went ahead with executing the shot.
Adds further, “Our team had good and experienced animators; hence animation was not much of a challenge. I must say, Rigging was a challenging aspect as it’s only with accurate rigging that you can animate perfectly and also the facial rig of the character the focal point.”
About a year has been taken to render this short film and the challenging factor of the short film, according to Sagar was rendering the car, informs more, “It was a huge task to render the car on our desktop as it took around an hour to render a single frame of the car.”
Also, the creative driving force for Sagar is Indian culture and untouched stories and he believes that Indian Animation has tremendous potential with good concepts and stories. “I’m sure; Indian Animation in future will come up with exemplary stuff”. Concludes Sagar.