Model Ahoy!!!

well i just got my hands on this. its pretty faithful to the original design except for the hair and the body attitude (the hair is completely wrong)
12" fibre glass body. will end up in Gaurav's office somehow. i just know it.

Cel to Cleaned up!

I was working on a scene and we got permission to put a little bit of it up.
The first one is a set of key poses, the second is cleaned up with a character.

- Naresh.

Hello from Manila!

well, not much to report. presently in Manila, overseeing some test animation while the stage layouts continue in Bombay. things are going well. We get the movement & gags from Bombay and try and work them out here. so far so good.

I return to Bombay Thursday night. I know there is one interesting little shot coming up for everyone soon.

Room with a view

Concept Art

Since part of the film is set in ancient India and this particular shot represents a palace we wanted to create something grand and indigenous.

This was one of the concept pieces we worked with but rejected. It was a hybrid of Indian & South East Asian architecture but gave off too much of a Mughal era look circa 1600's.

by Naresh

Data flow and management

Although a large part of the production is taking place in Bombay the actual artists are spread in locations as far as Montreal, Canada.

To ensure all artists are part of the process and the flow of data is smooth we devised a system where finished jobs are uploaded to a central server.

The person in charge of approving the art work has access to these files and only he allows the job to pass to the next team.

The next team on the line picks up the job and adds their value to the project and similarly their head allows the process to go ahead.

What this allows us to do is have a visual understanding of the process while being able to keep track of teams and their progress.

For us this system is imperative only due to the geographic differences, we would still prefer central data controls but minimize the number of individual milestones.

Rejected character designs

When you set out to create a character, you work with a brief which defines the key motivations of the character, the kind of physical structure you are going for and ultimately how it is to animate.
We did a bunch of character sets while designing one of our villainous characters. Although we binned some of them they aren't a total waste as we can use them for other projects later.



Number 20, was rejected for not having enough dignity to its character. Too cartoonish not enough of the right stuff.

Script & Development

The idea to do a film for the Indian audience came up in Jan of 2006, it was at that point that we seriously decided to sit down and come up with some characters and a story. Sometime down the line however we hit a roadblock with the script.

It felt forced and didn't seem to develop naturally enough to give the characters an opportunity to develop on their own. It seemed to me as if they were being forced to go in a certain direction rather than taking roads naturally. So we paused on development work until the end of August to focus on the script.

When we came back to it our script changed a lot in the way the characters were connected to each other. Relationships were established and some characters were amalgamated into others.
I truly think with any film the script is what makes or breaks the project.

It was frustrating to rip up what we thought was good and start again or change things (deleting a character all together) but the truth is without good solid writing it would be impossible to work on any level.

A good script has to be rewritten countless times. We ultimately wrote about 6 drafts 1-3 had many differences but were evolutionary. Once we got to number 4 we were happy with the overall direction of the story. From then onwards there were no major changes just tweaks and tie ups.

So if any of you working on a script feel like its going nowhere, hang in there, try different things and write different drafts. Sit down and look at all of them and you will probably find an answer by mixing things around.