SM reader Ravi Swami is an animation designer, and I love what little of his work I’ve seen. His demo reel includes retro desi artwork, war propaganda-style satire, psychedelic flying Bugs and a kitschy robot that’s a cross between Sky Captain and Futurama.
Swami mashes up kaleidoscopes, lotus mandalas, Indian revolutionaries and multi-armed deities. Behind a Bollywood theater, London’s Erotic Gherkin lurks erect. It’s all set to the moody atmospherics of Domenico Modugno’s original recording of ‘Volare,’ popularized again by the Gipsy Kings. Watch the demo reel.
The Spitfire beer ad is quite witty: pouring a draught becomes a visual pun about rolling a fighter plane. Brill! The reel also includes a snippet of an animation called ‘Mr. and Mrs. Singh.’ Its visual style is tremendous, 3D with a watercolor look:
A few years ago Ravi developed a short film with Gurinder Chadha which was to be shown before the film Bend it Like Beckham. When the Channel 4 animation department folded, so did the short. A real shame because… such a high profile film [could] have helped to resurrect the feature film trailer as a legitimate forum for quality animation shorts… [Link]
Most of the desi bits in the demo reel are from his short film ‘Blood Sutra,’ with director Rajesh Thind and a title shared by a Vijay Iyer album. As part of a public health campaign, the short fights desi superstitions about donating blood. Paper doll doctors dance bhangra at the hospital; a phillum poster announces the debut of an Indian starlet, ‘Heema Globin.’
… Rajesh and Ravi have also gone for a rapid-fire episode series… Shorts within a short if you like. This approach may have something to do with Ravi’s early obsession with Zagreb School Animation and the ‘Mini-mini’ series. The influence of the animated one-minute gag can certainly be seen in ‘Blood Sutra.’ Ravi’s views on the irony of the communist Zagreb School evolving into the capitalist Red Bull adverts could spawn a whole Ph.D. thesis… [Link]
Most who mine old Indian health propaganda (‘An Ideal Boy‘) do so purely for art’s sake, winkily adorning a coffee table book or T-shirt. But Swami re-applies the parody to the source. What can you say about making doctor cutouts do a silly dance, then sticking them back in a hospital? It subverts without subverting. I’ve never had so much fun watching a health film. Watch the short (3:01).
The blood donation short for Chinese Brits is ethereally animated (though bordering on cliché), and the mainstream version is nicely tongue-in-cheek. You can find all the bloody films here.
