the bong update

Just came back from a wonderful weekend at Atlantic City. Every year, Bengalis from all over North America get together for the North American Bengali Conference (NABC), also called the "Bongo Sommelon" in Bengali. This year, it was held at Atlantic City. It’s basically a huge get-together of Bongs from all over, with live performances from local and famous artists, cultural exhibitions, and super-expensive food. To be honest, I wasn’t too excited about it.

Yes, I’m a cultural person, and I love being a Bengali. But I never quite enjoyed Bengali music, film, literature, etc. I appreciated the fact that we Bengalis are an artistic lot, but never engaged myself in it. I was pretty much a Westernized child while I lived in Calcutta. And I liked Hindi films and music more than Bengali…

But now I’ve come back an almost-die-hard fan of percussionist, Bickram Ghosh (there’s something about live percussion performances that make you feel good about life), bought two of his albums, and a bunch of films by Bengali directors, Anjan Dutt and Aparna Sen. I even considered buying some translated Tagore and Satyajit Ray shorts, but they were pretty expensive compared to its original price in Rupees. But that’s what you get for leaving your country and wanting things from there! Definitely check Bickram Ghosh out though.

Speaking of Bengalis, last month’s 11 Second Club winner was a Bengali from my hometown! I took a look at his other entries and he has track record of high-rated submissions. It’s nice knowing that you don’t necessarily have to come all the way to the US, despite the slew of opportunities you get here, to be awesome at animation. In fact, there are so many opportunities now in India.. even in Calcutta.

And speaking of the 11 Second Club, I tried my hand at last month’s competition. I wasn’t too proud of what I did but it was my first time and just an attempt to make sure I keep at this animation thing. I think most people didn’t like it cause I didn’t have a creative scenario going on. I read all the instructions about how you shouldn’t spend too much time on the looks and modeling, and went ahead and assumed you can’t be creative with it, which was rather silly of me. But anyways…I made some changes to it. It’s still not perfect obviously. But I’ve a lot on my plate now, and I think I should start off with simpler exercises- like with body dynamics and stuff- before diving into dialogue and acting. I haven’t even formally learned how to lip-sync yet.

Redone Entry

I recently bought a tablet (Intuos4 Small) and downloaded a trial version of ToonBoom. There’s a lot I want to do in whatever’s left of Summer, but I don’t have too much time. Nevertheless, I’m going to try. I’ve never used a tablet before so I have to get used to sketching on that, and also, animating with it. I realized a few days back that I’m really not equipped to do any one thing. Yeah, I made a traditional hand drawn film that got a lot of recognition, but apart from drawing on paper, I really don’t know how to do much of anything else. I know bits of different things, but not comprehensively. The last few days I’ve been pretty demotivated about the skill-set RIT’s given me so far and about the fact that I haven’t really had much responsibility given to me at my internship because I don’t know anything extensively yet.

Train Doodles

I think I just need to get back to the workflow to start feeling good about myself again.

So, the past few weeks while I was rotoscoping mindlessly, I got myself hooked onto the Animation Podcasts, Spline Casts and Animation Mentor Webinars. While all the talk of CalArts being The Place to go for animation kinda got me disconcerted, I learned SO much about the industry just by listening to all these people speak. It’s awesome, really. Really inspiring.

Train Doodles II

Anyway, looong post! So the next few weeks, I really need to get started on translating footage. There’s about 160 Gigs of it that I got from the filmmaker last week. Now that my exam’s over, I can spend time on it. But at the same time, I also have to practice animating with a tablet, brainstorm viable ideas for my next film (and decide between 2D or 3D!) and complete at least ONE polished 3D animation exercise good enough for a reel. Because believe it or not, I’m already worrying about next Summer. I've already kindof started thumbnailing an idea, but I think the idea's still too ambitious right now.

Nritya

And just so you know- if you ever have one of those days when you feel negative about your work and feel kindof worthless- donate to charity. Sounds clichéd, but at least you’re doing something. It really does make you feel good.

Enjoy the 100 degrees!!

Summore Drawrings

They're a little skewed because of the way I photographed them...


We focused on the head today. I think I got better as I went along...



The weeks are going by so fast. Before I know it, college will be over.

energies

It's been a while since I put stuff from my figure drawing class up here. Last week we had a model with really dynamic poses. These were all 1 minute poses.


And although I know a lot of things aren't perfect about these two drawings, I really like them for some reason.


Probably the way they're so disproportionate.

Inky Pinky Ponky

Finally, the gesture drawings I promised myself I would put up:


And doggies!... The first one and some of the second are of Joey, my 2 year old Pomeranian. The rest are my teacher's dogs.
I did some while I was in Kolkata, in preparation for what would potentially be my one-quarter project here at R.I.T. I've yet to scan them. I really want to do something gestural and cultural. Going back to India twice in 3 months might've been a driving force :P

My original idea was to have the animations on a hand-made paper texture... All traditional. But as I think more about it, I want to do more to it... Add backgrounds with watercolors, etc... I went to the souvenir shop in Kolkata, because I wanted to take back memories of my city, no matter how tourist-y that seems. And I found beautiful postcard collections of watercolor and ink paintings of just ordinary scenes of Kolkata. It was called Portraits of Kolkata and the paintings were by Samir Biswas. They were really inspiring in their simpicity. It wasn't displaying the (stereotypical) "rich culture" of India to tourists- with colors and well-known festivals or anything like that. I'm not denying India has a rich culture or is monochromatic or anything. But sometimes one needs to stop and look. At the chai shops propped under a Banyan tree. The little hand-made mandirs on the side of the road.

I'm trying to find some website reference to his work as I type this. It's amazing how little known some great illustrators are. Samir Biswas probably isn't that obscure, at least not in Kolkata. I just found out he did the drawing for the restaurant, Oh Calcutta!

Speaking of which, I bought a few beginner's Bengali books from Kolkata for my friend who wants to learn to write Bengali script. It had little drawings next to the alphabets.. Like in an English book you would have the drawing of a cat next to the letter "C". And we were both talking about how these illustrators are overlooked. They're just so amazing and simple and expressive. You should walk into a crowded book fair in the fields one day and step into the children's educational book stalls. Awesome. I wish I appreciated all this before when I had such easy access to them.

Here are some stuff.. Not exactly what I'm talking about, but stuff I find to be great nonetheless:

Some of them (not these ones in particular) remind me of the John and Faith Hubley styles...And I absolutely love their works. I watched The Tender Game today on CartoonBrew and it made me tremendously happy.

Anyway, I'm going off on tangents. My point is, looking at those paintings by Samir Biswas, I want my film to have similar backgrounds. There's too much inspiration around me to let me settle with one idea and be satisfied with it. I guess my ideas are still amorphous at the moment.

Another one of my inspirations was a short film called Madagascar, carnet de voyage, which we saw in the Animation Show of Shows conducted by Ron Diamond at our school last quarter. I absolutely fell in love with it.

Speaking of inspiration, I finally decided to motivate myself to find time to start reading again. I went to the library today after class and got a book. Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. It's a collection of short stories. Might be a little too serious/deep seeing as what I really wanted was light reading. But I'm gonna do this. Finish it before it's due.

I should go back to studying Ethics now.

and once again.

I figured since I have time now, I'll get the gesture drawing stuff up here as well. I LOVE gesture drawing!!!


And environments!