In creative animation, you are only limited by your imagination, maintains Oscar-winning animator Adam Wyrwas from Poland.
Mr. Wyrwas is in India for over three months now, helping out Studio Eeksaurus’ animator Suresh Eriyat finish his forthcoming short film, Tokri .
Award winner
Fisherwoman and Tuk Tuk , a short animation film by the Tripunithura-born Eriyat, has so far bagged some 14 honours, national and international, including the National Award for the best animation film.
Mr. Eriyat, his spouse and colleague at Eeksaurus, Neelima, and Mr. Wyrwas were at Kerala Cartoon Academy’s ongoing CariToon Festival on Monday.
The Eeksaurus team has been working on Tokri since 2010 and has completed about nine minutes of the film. “The remaining few minutes were a tad complicated, so we roped in Adam as the lead animator and he’s been able to do a wonderful job in three months. It will be a path-breaking animation film for the country,” Mr. Eriyat said.
Mr. Wyrwas, who had taken to animation in 1984, had done numerous short films for children when the Peter and the Wolf team sought to work with him. The film landed him the Oscar.
‘Breaking a record’
“I’ve done films with 25 characters before, but now I’m breaking my own record by working in Eriyat’s venture which has over 100 characters. There’s no dearth of experience in animation in India. Only, the cartoons are a bit premature. But there’s a strong thread of creativity and story in them. I’ll finish Tokri by the end of May to return to Poland for some projects there,” held Mr. Wyrwas.
At the event, Mr. Eriyat took the audience through some of the landmark animation and live action films he had done. Talking about Tokri , he said Mr. Wyrwas was working with little animation puppets with great precision, giving them movement and life. “People think that animation is all about computers. Computers are just a tool. It can’t do everything. There’s a storyboard and painted clay puppets are brought alive scene by scene and shooting is done using still camera, which records the movement of characters by each millimetre. Once the shooting is done, you need to clean up each frame erasing the strings that move puppets and other external objects. Great attention is given to detailing,” he said.
India, he said, needed serious animation films with convincing stories.
