Category Archives: Past Events

Meet E Suresh

Past Events

Part 1
Dec 4, 2021 | 5:00 PM IST

A respected resume that includes 400+ films, 200 awards, including 2 National Awards and the prestigious Annecy festival Cristal, a first for India in 2015. Suresh advocates for Animation to be respected as a means to tell stories and not as a technique as commonly misunderstood. His stories come to life from the socio-cultural political environment where people, habits and culture are ingredients. Indigenous Visual Design is inherent in his ingenious craft of film making.

Click here to read more about Suresh

Born in Kerala, in 1973, Suresh graduated from the prestigious National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad specializing in communication design in 1997. Since then, he has been relentlessly working in the field of animation and film design. In the difficult and early days of development of the animation genre in India, Eriyat established Famous House of Animation in 1998. It was this landmark venture through which he was able to realize numerous animated ads, shorts, music videos with many firsts, which brought not only national and international recognitions but also changed the way people perceived animation in India. Optimizing the learning and experience of 11 years from there, he founded Studio Eeksaurus, in 2009, that creates films in a media agnostic manner in all formats and platforms.

Session Recording  – Part 1

Session Photos – Part 1

Part 2
Dec 18, 2021 | 5:00 PM IST

Session Recording – Part 2

Session Photos – Part 2

Presenting Rajiv Chilaka

Past Events

An alumni of the Academy of Art, San Francisco, USA, Rajiv’s entrepreneurial journey started with a vision of creating an animation studio at par with the best in the world. This took shape with the establishment of Green Gold Animation in 2004. In an industry still in its nascent stages, his journey was punctuated with more challenges than opportunities. Braving the odds, he created and brought India’s most loved and iconic character, Chhota Bheem, to life.

Today, as the CEO of the Green Gold Group, he leads a team of over 800 artists who have produced over 10 shows, 700 episodes, 80+ TV movies and 6 Feature films in the last decade itself.

Click here to read more about Green Gold Animation

Green Gold Group’s footprint spans across television, movies, digital and L&M reaching an audience of over 100 million kids globally. It also owns and licenses India’s biggest children’s IP with over 100 brands across multiple categories. Green Gold Animation has won many accolades and achieved many a milestone, the most recent being the creator of India’s first Netflix original animation series, Mighty Little Bheem. A global success, Mighty Little Bheem is a testament to the spirit of creation that drives Rajiv and the Green Gold Group.

Session Recording

Session Photos

Storyboarding with Nick Sharma

Past Events

In the live only session, Nick is going to share his personal journey, starting all the way from working as a comic book artist at Raj Comics in India to working at the Walt Disney feature Animation Studios in Burbank California. He is going to be talking about some of the struggles and challenges he faced along the way. He will also share some of his insights about the craft and break down his process of storyboarding.

Click here to read more about Nick Sharma

Nick Sharma is a story artist currently working at Walt Disney Animation Studios. He was born in India and lived there for the first 23 years of his life, before moving to the United States to pursue his dream of working in the animation industry in Los Angeles.

He has boarded both for feature and TV series. Prior to Disney, He worked for Duncan Studios and Netflix Animation.

Session Photos

Presenting Ishan Shukla and the art of Schirkoa

Past Events

Awards and Recognitions:
Selection: Academy Awards, ‘Best in Show’: SIGGRAPH Asia
Winner: American Movie Awards, Bollywood Film Journalists Awards
122 film festival screenings, 35 international Awards

In this session, Ishan will focus on his journey as an artist. “Over the years with many passions, I had to focus on one. Why I felt animation amalgamated all my passions and turned out to be a rather smart approach to realize my ambitious stories. I will shift focus to Schirkoa- the short film that took 4 years amidst day jobs, family and financial roadblocks. Finally I will speak about my journey to realizing a feature film. With the trends and advances in tech, the animation skills and digital tools are rapidly getting futile and writing should be the art form we all should ultimately focus on. Reaching out to producers, investors and hopping film markets to find like minded partners. I will also briefly talk about the tech part. The game engine in which the film is being realized.” 

Click here to read more about Ishan Shukla

Ishan drew many original comics before finishing school. He found his love for films, theater and animation at BITS Pilani and ultimately dropped out to pursue animation. After working in the Singapore animation industry for several years, spearheading projects ranging from TV commercials to series, he decided to come back to India to work on his own stories. Meanwhile, he switched many unrelated jobs to keep himself afloat in order to continue to work on his film. Amidst these brief stints, he managed to finish his short film single-handedly in 4 years working nights and weekends. He has now set up his own animation studio ‘Red Cigarette Media’ to work on personal, adult oriented animated feature films. His first animated feature ‘SCHIRKOA’ is set to hit festivals by 2023. An international co-production, Schirkoa is being developed completely in a game engine.

Session recording

Session Photos

Presenting Blackbird Design Studio

Past Events

Blackbird Design Studio was born out of the passion of four artists, Rajesh Thakare, Troy Vasanth, Niwesh Gurung and Nalini Bhutia. The dream of weaving stories in all forms, be it murals, music or animations, started in 2018. Since then, the studio has been a part of various projects with Discovery, Hotstar, Disney+, Star Networks and everyone else looking for a creative form of expressing themselves.

Click here to read more about the founders

Rajesh Thakare is an animator and artist. He graduated from Raheja School of Art in Applied Arts in the year of 2004. Worked for Tata Interactive systems as an Illustrator for 2 Years. He went on for post-graduation studies in Animation Film Design at National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad) and convocated in year of 2009. Rajesh completed his Joint Diploma film ‘Good Morning Mumbai’ along with his co-director Troy Vasanth in 2011. The film won many awards in various animation film festivals including Jury Critic Award and Silver Conch at MIFF India 2012. Till 2018 he worked in the media industry as an Animator, Promo-Producer and Animation Director. In 2018 he teamed with 3 NID alumni and co-founded Blackbird Design Studio. 

Troy Vasanth is an animation film designer and an alumni  of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. He is also a visiting faculty at various design schools in India and his hobbies include dancing and motorcycling.

Niwesh Gurung an NIDian, Animator from Darjeeling has worked as a Senior Designer in Cognizant Technology Solutions and as an Associate Producer at Viacom 18 where he is currently a Supervising Producer.

And here is a bit about our other speaker Aman Gupta.

Aman Gupta is a stop-motion animator from Jaipur Rajasthan. He loves to see inanimate real-life objects in motion and to bring them to life; hence stop-motion which started as a hobby has now turned into a passion. From animating Legos to creating and animating cardboard sets and various materials, he brings his visions to reality. Stop-motion has widened his vision and makes him explore beyond reality. It allows him to tell stories, express emotions and feelings in a unique way. He has worked on various projects including some of his own. Most notable out of them is the collaborative project with Blackbird Design Studio where he learnt more about his craft and further honed his skills in stop-motion. The project gave him a glimpse of the world of Stop-motion and he cannot wait for to dive deeper into this amazing
field.

Session Recording

Session Photos