“WHO’S STORIES?” ANIMATION AS A LANGUAGE OF EXPERIENCES – BY PROSENJIT GANGULY, HELD ON 2ND/ 3RD / 4TH DECEMBER 2013 AT JAIN UNIVERSITY

The workshop on the subject of “Storytelling” was conducted by a well known expert Prosenjit Ganguly. Prosenjit Ganguly studied Visual Communications [Animation] at NID in1998, Ahmedabad. He has also worked as Director of Special Projects, with Toonz Animation India (2002-2009) creating award winning animation properties for international broadcasters. His short films have been showcased at prestigious film festivals in over 20 countries, winning several international awards and nominations. Prosenjit is regularly invited as a speaker at prestigious festivals and forums that include, TED x, Anifest India, Hamburg Film Festival, Asifa India amongst many others. His ‘Living Animation’ series of Ideation Workshops have been attended by hundreds of participants from Design Schools, prestigious organizations and top studios like Electronic Arts.

Ideation and imagination is one of the most critical things to teach. Unless we provide an opportunity to open up their mind it will not happen. These three days of intense workshop was one of those opportunities to the students to explore creative ways of telling the story. The first day of the workshop was begun with the introduction to the topics;

Prosenjit Ganguly in Action

Prosenjit being welcomed by Rameshchandra

Workshops by Industry experts are considered as high value additions to the education system since they bring Industry perspective and expectations to the University contents. iNurture ToonSkool has always tried to bring these Industry interventions in to the class rooms for providing the high value to the students. As we know the expert being the person who contributes to the domine of his expertise in the Industry how does he provide an exposure to the students can also be a great opportunity to the faculties.

Origin of our stories

The Visual Language of Animation

The second day was planned for a practical experience of visual story telling. Since story telling does not restrict to only oral or writing, exploring other means of narrating story was important in the workshop. Basic format of storytelling on which today’s cinema and animation is based is nothing but theater. Skit is the short format of the theatrical acting of an idea or a concept. Conveying an idea to the audience in minimum duration, using any material available in the surrounding is a big challenge. Also minimum dialogues make it still challenging. The students think and act spontaneously in this given situation and explore creatively to resolve these challenges of storytelling are a very good exercise in this kind of workshops. Prosenjit engaged the students very effectively in this exercise and extracted very good visual thinking from the students.

Students performing the Skit

In the second exercise students were introduced to the Concept generation activity by the expert.  Students were given fifteen minutes time to write words that associate with different emotions. Ex: Anger, Hunger, Memory, Nostalgia, chaos, time, play etc. Students were asked to choose any two themes from these and further expand them in terms of visual association. For example, Hunger may evoked by the visuals such as food, Preparation of the food, person eating, person begging for food, Animals such as dog/ cats prying for food, food displayed in shops, Restaurants, on streets etc. Then expert asked the students to go out and capture videos of any image that reminds / evokes hunger in our brains. The next process was to use software like Movie maker, Adobe after effects and edit the videos using an audio track and its beat. This approach of telling a story visually is very experiential and gives students varied opportunity to explore the meaning or demeaning of an image seen across the road, both inside and outside.

On the third day of the workshop students were allowed to explore the drawing and were given a tough task of visualizing the statement “Smoking is injurious to health”. The condition laid in visualizing were, student should not use; the image of the heart, Cross mark. Images of the cigarettes, skulls, lungs etc. These images are used by any poster / advertisement on cigarette pack or outside. This forces the students to think out of the box and get some idea how to convey this statement as a visual image.

Faculty Sushanth Mondal posing for students

Later in the day, expert spoke elaborately on the topics:  Elements of Animated Storytelling,

Creating  impossible  worlds, Elements  of  Writing for Animation Cinema.                                                                                         The information provided on these topics  helped every student  not only to think unique  and  look at diverse examples for building their future career as a story teller in any medium whether Animation / Live action .

 Source: www.kino-teatr.ru