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Dhimant

VyasFor veteran animator

Dhimant Vyas, clay was

more than just a child’s play.

In an Interview with

Animation Reporter , he tells

us why he is affectionately

known as Kaka, his stints at

Aardman Studios and why

stop-motion animators are

more prone to backaches.

Joyce Lemos

You come from a line of tem-ple architects and sculp-tors. How has your family

background affected your life as an artist?I come from a family of temple architects and Indian art sculptors belonging to the traditional Sompura community from a small town called Dhrangadhra in Gu-jarat. It is believed that art is in our blood. Most of the kids in the Sompura families are talented and are good at drawing and making sculptures. To me this helped in the later stages when I was studying animation and clay animation, which included sculpting and drawing. We be-longed to a lower-middle-class Gujarati

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Wfamily and my late father Dalpatram had a tough time raising us. My father spent his hard-earned money on educating us to brighten our future. I did my commercial art from Vallabh Vidhya Nagar for 5 years after SSC. Over here I was exposed to painting, sculpt-ing and commercial art. Adept at all, my faculty often wondered whether I was a student of painting, commercial art or sculpture. There was a lot of freedom and my teachers and principal always supported me. I received immense support from my family and friends. My childhood friend Yogi and his family used to support me for my education. Plus my uncle’s son Kishor was also pursuing Fine Arts and he was an inspiration to me. I learnt a lot from my uncles, Chhelshankar Sompura and Jaganath Sompura about struc-ture; how to bring volume and anatomy. So later when I got involved with clay animation, making models and clay puppets or any creature so all this knowledge helped me immensely. How did you develop a fascination for clay and clay toys?When I was a little child, my mother used to go to the river to wash clothes. At that time, there was no tap system and eve-ryone went to the river to wash clothes and take a bath. She use to return with fine clay from the river bed for me and then I would make little clay toys which my parents used to exhibit to relatives and friends with extreme pride. This en-couraged me greatly. My passion for clay started from here.

What were the most important les-sons that you have learnt from your mentors at NID?I studied classical animation at NID af-ter my Fine Arts course and specialized in Animation Filmmaking. The course taught us full design process and all as-pects of film making. NID was like our second home. We learnt a lot from our colleagues and our dedicated teach-ers like Nina Sabnani, Binita Desai and R.L.Mistry of animation, Prof. I.S.Mathur for film language, Barry Parker for lip-syncs, Akhil Succena for sound de-

sign and other visiting faculties for dif-ferent courses. There was a great bond between students and teachers and other staff which continues till today. There was a workshop held at NID where Joan Ashworth and Catherine Green-halgh came from UK to take a special stop-motion workshop. Nina Sabnani and Binita Desai gave me a chance to par-ticipate in the workshop. The workshop gave us complete stop-motion anima-tion training and taught us how the ani-mation was done and how a stop motion shoot takes place frame by frame; how to make puppets and what materials can be used like clay, leather, cloth, rubber solu-tion etc. After the workshop, Nina Sab-nani made the first stop-motion film ‘All About Nothing’ for which we were being trained. Nina Sabnani did the entire ani-mation while the other teammates and I did the set design and made models and puppets. It was here that stop-motion took its first steps in India.

Your first job was at Ram Mohan’s animation Studio. How did you get to become a part of Ram Mohan Bi-ographics? When I completed my course at NID there were not many options when it came to animation. Ram Mohan Bio-graphics was the only place where major animation activity took place. They pro-duced quality work. Here I worked as a key animator and did a few ad films. After this I joined Zee TV’s education centre ZICA in Hyderabad. I was invited as a faculty member by one of my NID professors I.S. Mathur who was head-ing ZICA. This was an exciting teaching opportunity and I taught there for three years. We were three Indian teachers Srinivas Bhakta, Irina Saakian and myself from the second batch onwards. Tell us about your first film? What was it about and what inspired you make it?My first animated short film at NID was based on the famous story the ‘Hare and the Tortoise’. I adapted this story and changed its context. At that time John Benson’s drug issue and how he was stripped of his Olympic medals was continuously in the news. In my story, the hare takes drugs and is helped by an evil vulture. On the other hand, the tortoise is exercising and is charged up with speed. This frightens the hare which leads him to take drugs. An owl

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takes notice of this and takes photo-graphs and the hare is caught red hand-ed. Those days we used to shoot on film and it was sent to Bombay for process-ing. We would get the results after one or two weeks to check if it was shot properly or not and if the camera move-ments, exposure, dissolve etc are right. And a lot of hard work went into editing the film and laying the sound track. Now computers have made everything very easy. But at the same time we feel lucky to get this kind of experience which is rare these days in today’s education. What were the animation styles used in making the title sequence in Taare Zameen Par?For animating the title sequence in Taare Zameen Par I used the embossed clay animation technique. Generally people would animate a 3D puppet in a 3D miniature set. But I tried a new tech-nique; it was shot with a table top camera on a plain white background. Here I used all embossed models and the animation was done on white background. The models were not entirely 3D but were 1/2, or 1-2 cm embossed. So the charac-ter like fishes, tortoises etc are only half built, but when you see the animation it looks like full character moving in 3D space. How did you visualize the shots for the animation scenes in Taare Zameen Par?The basic idea of the film was from Aamir Khan. After watching the entire film we discussed the elements that could be used like the one in the dream sequence. I gathered a lot of ideas about what the main character likes and noted them down. There is a wall of paintings by Darsheel, the main character, which

helped greatly. I included the visual ele-ments painted on the wall and also took suggestions from Aamir. I included the visual elements like fishes painted on the wall. Aamir suggested what could be animated and that humans can be avoid-ed. My personal story is also somewhat similar. While I was growing up, my child-hood days were also spent in the same way, collecting fishes and playing with dogs. I wasn’t serious when it came to studies. I referred to my childhood ex-periences and to my sketchbook where I always kept drawing something or the other. Using these references I visualized the TZP title animation sequence.

I had three excellent model makers work-ing with me; Arvind Chudasama, Vishal Mhala and Harshad Godbole. They were very good with their model making skills and understood the style. They are from an animation background and knew all the requirements. They made the mod-els and I was animating it the same time. The entire three minutes of animation was shot in two months. What are the other styles of anima-tion you like to work with and why?For any filmmaker, story telling comes first, then the style. The story should be told in such a way that the audience should forget about the aspects of film-making, including style, and get involved in the story. The style that suits the story best should be selected. An animation filmmaker should know all the styles and be flexible with different styles. All styles have their unique rich-ness and value which cannot be replicat-ed using other styles. I have worked with many different mediums like classical 2D animation, stop-motion, flash anima-tion, cut-out, pixilation, animation with various materials, but somehow most of the projects that came my way were clay animation. This gave me a lot of experi-ence. I do not restrict myself to just clay animation but also other techniques like 2D, even pre-production, concept art,

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character designs and all stages of the filmmaking process. The recent kida in my mind is to learn 3D computer gener-ated animation. Now 2D animation seems like a dying art form. It is one of the best mediums where lots of work needs to be done in India. I recently did a workshop in Delhi, where I used a combination of 2D and pixilation technique, placing a person near a white board and animated him and drew on the board frame by frame. I love all styles of animation and I like to experiment with different styles.

Tell us about your invitation to Aardman Studios?From the time I was at NID, I watched many stop-motion films. When Joan Ashworth came, she brought a collec-tion of Aardman films. I dreamt of get-ting a chance to work at Aardman. At the same time, I knew that it would very difficult to get a chance to get any anima-tion work in such a big studio. I used to joke to my wife that I would take up even a sweeper’s job if offered there just to

get an opportunity to learn. After working on many stop-motion projects at various studios, I made a show reel and sent it to Aardman. Then I received a mail saying that they re-ally liked my work and they invited me to work on the ‘Shaun the Sheep’ series 01 that was in production at that time. I wasn’t able to make it in time for the first series because of visa issues.

After a few years, I got an invitation from FlickerPix in Belfast and worked on the stop-motion series for BBC ‘On the Air’. I got invited to Aardman again to work on the ‘Creature Comforts’ USA series and started working there, which led me to work on the second series of ‘Shaun the Sheep’ in pre-production, animation and ‘Purple and Brown’s pilot and some pre-production for their feature films. Tell us about your first experience at Aardman Studios?Working on the ‘Creature Comfort’ se-ries taught me a lot. The quality work that happens there is of international standards. The crew members and my colleagues made the environment easy to work in. There was perfection when it came to the timing of animation,

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acting, lip-syncs and other aspects. At the same time, I got to experience the entire filmmaking process of how it is planned and produced. I also observed the other areas of work done by my colleagues like model making, set de-signing, camera work and rigging. I met many artists and talked to top directors like Nick Park, Peter Lords and Golly and learnt from their great experience. You have worked on acclaimed TV series and films like ‘Shaun the Sheep’ and ‘Purple and Brown’. What was your involvement and how did you go about with it?For ‘Shaun the Sheep’ I was involved with the storyboarding first and then moved to animation. The story-boards were done after the script was processed and finalized but there was space to add inputs from the storyboard artists. It is challenging to tell the story when there are no dialogues . We were supposed to animate six to eight seconds of animation approximately a day. There were around 16 units with different portions that di-vided the main locations. There were 4-5 episodes shot simultaneously to speed up the process as the sets cannot be changed every time. Everything was well planned from the beginning. For animat-ing the liquids we used KY Jelly, Petrole-um Jelly (Vaseline), Glue-gun drops and clean film. To create movements is a lit-tle problematic when it comes to liquids because it has to be animated really fast.

I animated various types of scenes for ‘Shaun the Sheep’, but most of the shots assigned to me were with Go Motion. It is mainly an extension of stop-motion where the backgrounds, moving ob-jects in the scene are moved while the

frames are shot with long exposure to get a blurry effect. So the moving object gives smooth and real life movements but at the same time the objects/ char-acters should not move. For example the wheels, the background elements, trees and road move, but the character is given a normal movement without blurriness in the shot. Controlling these movements is a little tough because if there are rods attached to a character, then they shouldn’t move. This involves controlled rigging to keep the character still at one point. The set design is planned from the very beginning and is moved frame by frame at the time of animation. This is a pain-ful exercise because every time when a movement is created by pulling, the set gets disturbed or doesn’t move at the right time. It is important to maintain the speed. It was an interesting and chal-lenging experience. Take us through a day at Aardman Studios? What was it like working at the world’s best stop motion stu-dio?The day at Aardman begins at 9:30 in the morning, but everyone arrives early around 9:00. The shots are planned the previous day itself, and it is already de-cided what will be the next shot after this. The production coordinator or-ganizes all of this. Then there is a team meeting if someone is starting a new shot. The director briefs the animator to start animation and checks the final look of the shot. Till the shot is finished the animators are not disturbed by any one as it requires full concentration. He would be alone animating any number of characters in a shot. In the whole day we were supposed to animate six to eight seconds of anima-tion, but this also depends on the com-plexity of the shots. This is a rough target but we try to be as quick as possible. Work was fun but also physically strenu-ous at the same time. We stood the entire time while shooting in different positions. We bent most of the times and the animators mainly faced back problems. Due to this you will find that

back problems are very common with stop motion animators. That is why we prefer relaxing on Saturday and Sunday. You are the first Indian to work at Aardman Studios. How does it feel to see your dream come true?It still feels like a dream. If you think you can, it is possible. If you dream big and

Dhimant Vyas with Nick Park

Dhimant Vyas with Peter Lord

Dhimant Vyas with Steve Box

Dhimant Vyas with Joan Ashworth and Cathy Greenhalgh

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work hard towards it, one can achieve it. One should also analyze one’s own work and know where he or she stands. The attitude of learning something new al-ways takes you forward. Being satisfied with one’s work kills an artist. While you were at Tata Interactive Systems, you directed the short ‘Happy Planet’. What was it like working with the trainees? How was the film done?For Tata Interactive, I was told to

conduct a workshop for illustrators and animators, and train them in clay anima-tion in a one month’s time. There was not much time to think of a story so we decided to make a film on environmen-tal issues. We combined and included all the ideas that were brought to the table in a story format. Each animator was given one or two days to animate. There were 18 animators and I guided them

while working on it. We were trying a new technique based on my earlier em-bossed clay illustration done for a comic book. The film too turned out to be good and won several awards, screened at various film festivals around the globe. How did the clay-comics at Toonz Animation start? How was it done?I was the Head of Development at Toonz

NID Memories

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WMy fascination for photography was even before I came into animation. I learnt a lot from my uncle Chhelshankar who was a great photographer. Studying at Fine Arts, I practiced still photogra-phy under the guidance of my teacher Shailendra Singh Kushwaha who began a course in photography which I took.

When I was in NID, I won a Gold medal at the 55th International Photographic Salon of Japan. I always take my camera along with me wherever I go. Why do people address you as ‘Kaka’?All children were younger to me in the street where I lived when I was a young boy. There were very few children my age. The neighbour’s children would al-ways call me ‘Uncle’. In Gujarat, uncle is called ‘Kaka’ and it started from there. Later at NID in Ahmedabad my NID’ian colleagues also started calling me ‘Kaka’, as I am a Gujarati. Even when I joined ZICA, I was known as ‘Kaka’. In Belfast also, the foreigners addressed me as ‘Kaka’ because it was easy for them to speak my name. Dhimant was a difficult name for them to say. Once when I was Aardman, a friend had called for me at the reception and asked for ‘Kaka’. The receptionist asked who is ‘Kaka’ and when she got to know it was me, she told everyone. It became my official name there, even outside my unit at Aardman I had my nameplate written as ‘KAKA’.

animation. Besides the pre-production and special projects, we had to pro-duce comic books every month. At that time, we tried out a lot of different stuff which was not usually seen in a normal comic book in those days, like various il-lustration styles. We combined various techniques giving each story a different treatment. I have always had a passion for clay and I always have clay with me. Also, the em-bossment on coins, masks and low relief sculpture is what I have always liked and given attention to. I don’t remember what exactly gave me the idea but I had made a figure and wondered if I could use it in a comic. I quickly designed a sim-ple story around it and made the visuals. In one of the stories, I used embossed clay illustrations making relief charac-ters and backgrounds, taking photos with special lighting and finally compos-ing it in Photoshop, making embossed clay comics. It became interesting and I always thought what if I can animate em-bossed clay characters. Which I tried by animating ‘Happy Planet’. I refined this style and adapted it for Taare Zameen Par title sequence animation. Why do you use pure gold foil in your paintings?I am inspired by various folk styles and created my style of painting. They are done on various subjects like tantric art, gods and goddesses, characters around us, abstract and my own life experiences. The pure gold foil used in my paintings is influenced by miniature paintings. Gold foils give a good texture and richness to the paintings. A lot of my paintings are done during my long distant train trav-els. It enables a distinct style because of the movement of the train, like rough lines instead of steady straight ones.

As an animator and filmmaker how has your passion for photography contributed to your artistic vision?Every filmmaker should know photog-raphy whether one is making a live ac-tion film or an animated one. Because things like lighting, composition, move-ment, technicalities and a lot of other as-pects of photography are used in films. It is a basic medium to tell the story.

How do you balance your family and professional life?It is hard but my wife Hina also comes from an Arts background and does drawings and sculptures. She has knowledge of Arts and also helps me in my projects and gets involved in it. My daughter Kavya helps me track sched-ules, reminding me things, helps me in mixing clay, making simple characters etc. After I complete my work, they both are the first people I ask for a true feed-back. They both honestly tell me if it is good or bad and are not afraid in giving their opinions. I get my first feedback of my work from them; a correct one. While making Taare Zameen Par, they both were continuously involved and al-ways helped me. As an artist who has been your greatest influence?There have been many animation film makers whose works have inspired me and motivated me to take up this field like Ishu Patel, Norman McLaren, Nick Park, Peter Lord, Dave Sproxton, Barry Purves, Bill Plympton, Chuck Jones, Jiri Trnka, John Halas, John Lasseter, Paul Driessen, Richard Williams, Will Vinton and great legend Walt Disney. What is your advice to young and upcoming animators?If anyone wants to succeed in Animation, then a passion for animation and talent is most important. If you’re a student, then work hard to establish yourself which may even take some time. As a student, it is your prime time to learn when your brain has most grasping power to learn. This is the time you can utilize in learning about animation film making, storytell-ing, music and sound, editing, culture, and all the aspect of film making. If you have a great desire to learn animation filmmaking then it is impor-tant to work very hard. Money is some-thing that will come to you by itself and if you are hard working with good work and good attitude then people themselves will come in search for you. www.dhimantvyas.comwww.dhimantvyas.com/blog