This animated film of mine was my attempt to acquaint myself with the entire process of making an animated film. I wanted to be as familiar and comfortable with animation as a medium of expression, as I am with drawing, and also wanted to figure out the technical aspects like the use of compositing and editing software.
It is about a little girl who is woken up one night by the thoughts that flow out of her head. These impish creatures dance and play around her room and do not let her sleep. All of a sudden they run off, out through her bedroom door and compel her to follow them. And so, she finds herself in places she has never been, right inside her own house. As she goes through these places, she changes and in the end she is another person, looking back at herself.
The film did not start as a story written in words. It started as drawings of a corridor with many doors, and drawings of winding staircases and large file cabinets with someone on a ladder opening drawers and looking for something. All these seemed to suggest the situation I was in, in a way like the phrase “being at the crossroads.” From here, I continued drawing the storyboard, thinking of the various things she could find behind the doors. Different drawings that I had made at different times in my old sketchbooks gave rise to several ideas as I flipped through them.
Making this film was a struggle, an experiment. Hence, this film is a collage of every whim of mine. But making an entire film on my own, from writing the story to animating the final product helped me attain self-discipline, which is essential to an independent artist or film maker.
