An Interview with Skel - On-duty for 15 days

The earth is symbolised by sand. We are showing sand falling from a hand. Then another person shreds his sweat. That is water. Then someone lights the torch and fire comes out of it. We show houses and buildings blown away by wind to show air. All of them are coming towards each other in the form of hands and joining together. In the middle lies our college emblem. And then its rising with all the elements in it. MCET. We must include all kinds of sound effects from vrooooooooom...... zoooooooom... ddddddddddddddaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam............... boooooooooooom....... doooooooooooooooooommmmm... It will shake the whole auditorium. Everyone will be thrilled. Then the emblem blasts off and then we show the centenary function emblem. Another sound effect like kaboooooooom... dooooooooom... follows. Then we slowly reduce the volume and start the function.

This is what our friend Rupesh told us when we asked him an idea for the multimedia presentation for the centenary function.

I just nodded and went back to room. When I reached the room, Anoop was very happy with his greatest achievement in Maya. He was now able to make a ball hit a wooden plank and then fell down. But he was upset suddenly. He forgot to place the floor. So the ball went on to fall forever. I just compared our current achievement and Rupesh's idea. The time we learn to animate sand, the centenary celebration of our vice chairman would arrive. So we decided to use Rupesh's idea in the future and decided to stick to something simple for that year. Many ideas were discussed like "Showing an animated person from each department working in the lab; mechanical student working on lathe, Electronics student working with CRO and IT student working on internet cables(God knows why) and computer student working on (what else) computers. All the images then combine together to (you are correct) form the college emblem which... (of course) blasts off to show (absolutely) centenary function emblem." Though the idea seemed very interesting, we kept it aside for our HOD's cenetenary function.

[+/-] Specialis Revelio

After a long discussion which took four on-duty days and browsing hundreds of websites from the data center, as time became a major constraint, we finalised upon animating only one person for the show. The script was not created as no one knew what was the story which was because no one knew what we could really do. Even then we started with our task of picking the crew. Seriously, I was overwhelmed by the response I got from the class showing their interest in 3d animations. I thought the success of our 1 minute intro to our Technical Symposium was behind their motivations. But I was proved wrong that the real reason was the 1 month on duty we got for that techincal symposium. But after a big confusion on deciding who will be on the team, we got the list of 10 persons who will be on-duty though how many of the 10 would really be animating the characters was a big question. It got answered on the 5th day when we finalised on an interview between a 3d character and a real human. The answer was 5/10 which included myself, Gokul, Anoop and Naveen.(I know I am missing the fifth person). But he was a visiting professor to the team similar to the college classes. He even stayed in Muthu's house for few days reasoning it as "Story discussion". We are still not sure with whom he was discussing the story and what the story was about. Only thing was he gave us with a script which was really good. So the answer of 5/10 holds good.

The next task was to do the real work. Animate. The time frame of the show went to atleast 5 mins which means we need to make 5 X 60 X 30 = 90000 frames of animation. The infrastructure was provided by our HOD which includes three Pentium 4 systems with 1 GB RAM and high speed internet provided in the data center itself. The next 10 days was a wonderful time as we were utilising the on-duty time perfectly. The day times were used for sleeping and eating. And sometimes to meet new people who are also roaming around in on-duty. Anoop of course didnt went to meet new people. As for myself and Gokul, lets just say we were clicking the mouse most of the time. The night was when we really worked. Rupesh would make use of his complete right brain in making creative ideas for the show and preferred to invent creative ideas while dreaming. And for that, he was in sleep most of the time. We called him as more dedicated person than anyone else around.

When we decided upon the action sequences for our character, we tried to apply them to the 3d character. This is where our whole idea of character animation changed. If you think Rajini diving over the villians is a big task, making a 3d character wave his hands is a much difficult task. All the bones have to be adjusted on the screen to make sure the character waves the hands properly. Our first try turned up as if the character's bones are broken. The second one was much scarier than before. Only the wrist was shaking with the elbow stiff. It took two days to make our character "skel" say Hi to the crowd. And then we have to make our character take his hat off. This was more difficult than saying hi. Dont ask me why the character being a skeleton had to wear a hat. We did not give him any other dress. Atleast no one complained about it. He was just a skeleton. Gokul and Naveen took up this hard task and they went on practising with the tools by imitating the action in real. They would move their hands and try to understand the bones that should be moved and at what times to make the action sequence. Even the finger bones has to be animated to make sure he removes his hat only after the fingers hold it.

The background song was none than "Kaaka Kaaka" special "Uyirin Uyirae" song which we would have run for atleast a thousand times and by the time, we were done with the animations, I became sick of hearing that song completely that I am not able to hear it ever again. After 15 days of on-duty spent, we finalized everything. I gave voice to Skel and Rupesh would be the real person on stage to interview the 3d character. Skel would do Rajini style "ithu epadi iruku", ogle at the girls, take off his head along with the hat, fly like Neo from "The Matrix" and would even say "Poyeaaaa poooooo" like Sadha in Jeyam.

Thanks to Naveen and Gokul who did most of the animations, the character came to live though not at the centenary functions but at the computer lab class in Virtual Class Room. And at the end of the show, Guru commented "Be happy that we didnt get the chance on the centenary function".

An honest comment though. It wasnt as good as we expected at the start. But it gave on-duty for 15 days with high speed internet in the best systems available in college. And whats more, it helped Rupesh to avoid coming late to the classes.

Disclaimer

No skeletons were harmed in the making of this movie except the animator's hands.