“That’s my nickname from NID,” chuckles Suresh Eriyat behind his thick salt and pepper beard, when asked why his design studio goes by the unusual name, Studio Eeksaurus. His agency, working out of a small office in Santa Cruz, is making waves as the creators of a logo ad for Rajasthan Tourism using sand animation.
The ad is part of the state’s new promotional campaign with the tagline, Jaane Kya Dikh Jaye , designed by Piyush Pandey and his team at Ogilvy. It’s been creating a buzz on social media ever since Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia shared it on Facebook in January, establishing the new Ogilvy designed logo.
Eriyat founded Eeksaurus in 2009, after he left Famous House of Animation at Famous Studios. It is India’s first studio which intertwines animation with live action to create brand identities. Eeksaurus created the Fateline series of ads for Rotary International, which won a major prize at 2015 Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France, the equivalent of the Oscars in the global animation world. They who also created Google Chrome’s Tanjore ad campaign, ‘web pages’ in Tanjore art style, to drive home the message of how traditional artists and entrepreneurs would use the power of the Internet to internationalise their work.
“When Mahesh Gharat (Ogilvy’s Creative Director) came to me, he came with the logo animation idea,” says Eriyat, seated in his office, tucked away in a bustling lane near Santa Cruz station. “He did not come to me with the idea of a film.”
He continues: “Rajasthan has an unexpected side to it. The campaign is based on how there is more to it than what you see in Rajasthan: the unexpected. My association with Rajasthan is with the sand. So, I discussed the idea of an interesting logo with sand animation. If you see sand animation films, rarely do the texture and feel of sand come through. We decided to use real sand so that it could be visually felt. It was challenging to show sand changing shape and visually translate it into animation.”
The 50-second film establishes Rajasthan through its traditional architecture like Jaipur’s Hawa Mahal, its desert through a herd of camels, a ravanhatha player on a desert landscape and a Rajasthani girl dancing on a step-well, before the last frame freezes into the logo of two birds flying off two resting camels.
Eeksaurus’s creative team, led by project lead and senior animator Rajib Mandal, came up with several ideas. “We got several beautiful results,” Eriyat says. “One thing we realised that when you create so many different forms, it is going to be tough to maintain form through animation. Then we approached Dhimant Vyas, the renowned stop-motion animator, who said that it would take two or three months.”
With barely a month’s time to deliver the finished product, Eriyat’s team figured out another method of doing it. “We decided to create laser-cut stencils of 2D animation. So, we create the entire film in 2D animation before translating it into sand animation,” Eriyat says. “We converted everything, the camels, the dancing girl, etc into artworks, and then made them into laser-cut stencils. We applied clay on one side of the stencils, and stuck sand on the other side to achieve a sense of sand consistency. This made every frame seamless.”
Eriyat thanks Piyush Pandey and his team at Ogilvy for having faith in Studio Eeksaurus to deliver the project. “When we initially discussed the idea, we didn’t know how we would execute it. But Piyush, Mahesh and team believed in us. Otherwise, we could not have pulled off such a big experiment. This kind of logo animation is immortal. It is not going to phase out with time, with changing trends,” he says, concluding, with certainty, “It is a classic.”
You can see the video on YouTube: Making of Rajasthan Tourism Logo Ad
The 50-second film establishes Rajasthan through its traditional architecture: the famous Hawa Mahal, and
the camels
