His Story

This is my first animatic:





A look at history from two angles:
the artifacts at a museum and that which is
passed down from one generation to the other,
this is the first cut,the music is from Kabir,
a 15th century mystical poet captured in this
brilliant documentary by Shabnam Virmani called:
Chalo Hamara Des

Are You Listening?

Last summer I was doing this animation project called Kelkkunnundo, (Are
you Listening?)

It was entirely in Malyalam, a language I do not comprehend and about a
blind girl, a visual language I do not comprehend either. It was kind of
challenging to not get bogged down by both.


My tutor, Prakash Moorthy
helped me translate this bit that
I was going to animate, a local fable
about a cat and a fly. We did not
want to make the drawings abstract,
or to visualize how it would be for
the blind to see. I thought it would
be too literal. I had Hasna's voice
over with me as my only reference.




My inspiration was early Walt
Disney.
The time when people were
beginning to understand the
possibilities of the medium of
animation. It was a new uncharted
territory of make-believe that was
completely new to the way we saw
things. Case in point- the talking
mouse!





















This is the trailer:

Conversation with my Father

I am beginning my MA project finally!
After a circuitous process of doing
one week projects exploring my new
found city, I am strangely being affected
by these stories that my father tells me
in an innocent attempt to make me realize
where I come from. They run, overlay'ed,
as I take my walks through galleries,
cobbled alleyways, and chrome tinted
shopping malls.

I got this mail from Dileep Cherian one
early morning. This is the phase where you
don't know where your project is going to go.
But it is so nice to hear from people I haven't
met, feels like if I meet them again, we can
have conversations like you would with
old friends!

hi aindri,
had seen your blog many months back
when an NID friend of mine fwded it.
today i stumbled on it again, and i
happened to see the 'conversation with
my father'. it was so real and moving
and i believe everything your
father said.

One of my favourite tutors from NID, Immanuel
Suresh shared this with me today as well:

"It reminded me of some other stories

of my dad also but I am sure u wouldn't
have understood MISA it happend
somewhere in 76. I guess I was also
small then.
CocaCola was driven out in 76 and a
new govt. was formed in 77 and the
drink was called Double Seven 77.."


I got this beautiful poem from Mr. Brij
Chatrath. It is lovely to find feedback
as stories, poetry or just encouragement!

You hold the small finger of the hand

Which feels so small in your hand

With love and affection

You tug it along

Till the strength of the wind

Gives her – her own wings!

You release the hand

And stand on the sand

Those impressions of a distant land

The father sees

In his own hand

The strength of the child

So he extends it from a distance

To touch and feel

The welfare of the child

In a distant land

Across many seas!

New Pen Tool

MTV+ME contest for Eyeka-asia
This one is my favourite because it's a bit whimsical.



This is the one which won:





Vh1 Classic, done ages back finally found
it's way to Vimeo. Yes. I'm that lazy.

________________________________________























Aaj humne kiya collage.

Liberatum
is an organisation based in London
that creates a platform for cultural exchange
between Britain and the rest of the world.
The catalogue illustration collages
a few places where they have had festivals
before, namely Venice, New York, Marrakesh
and Moscow


________________________________________



Around the World, The British Museum



A look into the culture of a museum
(British Museum) the people who visit,
and removing the formal boundaries
of the visitor and the exhibit.

We had 2 weeks on this. I would like
to explore this further, possibly for my final
project.


WOMAN + "Life Drawing" while I "Character Design."


woman+giraffe.
























woman+gorilla

















woman+woman

interlude

this had no process.it appeared in a dream but i failed to interpret it,
it was a different story in my head, somehow on the mixer, the soundscape took
it to a different direction.

the make-believe maker

the 'classroom project' is a 5 minute animation film which evolved from a story i wrote under duress(always at the last minute!) two years back at a personality and caricature class.the story is about a boy with a pair of wings which he uses as a convinience to escape the 'evils of growing up'.little does he realise that as he grows up, his wings shrink and become a vestigial part of his adult life. he is stuck in a clinical lifestyle with a boring desk job and no imagination.the ending is a visual anecdote of his son playing with a toy aeroplane and him sitting around smiling at the irony of it all.

fatal 'art'traction

the ideal match? maybe ADAM and the CAVEMAN.
MICHAELANGELO's masterpiece on the walls of the SISTINE CHAPEL
and the CAVE OF LASSCAUX had a common canvas.
both were paintings on walls. frescos.
both were threaded into our histories albeit at different times.
michaelangelo's theme is mythology.the grandeur depicting
the beauty and horror of the LAST JUDGEMENT.
so was the cave man's version a MYTH too?
of course he was unaware of the last judgement and adam and eve's
fall from grace.
but the simple drawings of his tribe hunting a mammoth etc.
could be a myth too.
a sacred lie.
a piece of the imagination,a scrawny depiction of the ideal.
BUT WHAT COULD KEEP THE TWO APART?!the beautiful estranged adam.
and the classical stick figure,gone to hunt.
forget the homosexual undertone and its blasphemous implications.
just imagine! the perfect matrimony of two different worlds.
fact and fiction.reality and myth.(i am not oppossing darwin! i think we
climbed down trees and hunted woolly mammoths)
what we can see, we can decipher.
WHAT WE CANNOT SEE NEED NOT BE UNTRUE,you know.
it's just that we havent found the language.the language of reasoning
for certain things and thank god for that.
and i will still believe in adam and eve,because for whatever's worth,
it's a beautiful imaginative account of my history,even though
there are thousands of evidence telling me i was an ape once.
actually that seems like a beautiful story too!
only if the scientists stopped claiming that it is the ultimate truth.
then the MAGIC goes undone.
i believe in STORIES. and i want to live for them.

passerby

lines speak a thousand words.like words they make up the emotion of the drawing.
a linear visual has so many layers of pain and joy,no stroke on the page is done without intention.
our mind races ahead,our fingers follow.
the line is an artist's tool,ever since he could scrape his environment on walls.but around us,
there is merely mass seperating mass.even my hand against the glaring sun,the bright,the dark,
the various shades of the charcoal.
i like egon schiele.his lines have pathos,and the painful strain of a distant violin.
'passerby' is an attempt to make little stories out of his sketches.his sketches come to me without
context.his moments of delirium,his madness,his weak moments.they have become lost in history,
what comes to me is a page of jumbled lines,constructed bodies,and mournful facades.
and little stories,maybe a man stiching up his past.or someone who has so much to say that he'd rather
remain silent.
just like his quick sketches,they are fleeting glimpses of people passing you by.passersby.