Making ‘Wade’
The four year long journey behind a climate change horror story.
When we decided to make a large, ambitious animated short film within a couple of years of leaving college, we never knew how tricky it would be, or how much we’d end up learning along the way. It all began in the Animation Film Design department of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. We received fairly rigorous training in the craft of animation, and got a lot of encouragement to ‘go back to where we are from and tell our own stories’. The slip is they don’t really tell you how that looks and works out on a day to day basis. Making ‘Wade’ was all about throwing ourselves in the deep end without a very clear picture of how it would pan out.
Introduction
‘Wade’ was born in early 2016. All in all, it was in the making for a solid three years, and one instinctively feels the need to defend that.
Most of the people who worked on the film are graduates from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, the directors included. Animation, we feel, is a community exercise, and we’re very grateful to the college for assembling that community for us.
Before ‘Wade’, we had spent a lot of time in Mumbai. It started just after graduating from the National Institute of Design, and the very first project out of college was a title sequence for Mani Ratnam’s ‘OK Kanmani’, a job so heavily time bound that we would stay sleep in shifts to make sure at least one team member was awake for the entire ten days till delivery.
While we had informally animated on Photoshop before, this was probably the first beginning to end project made entirely in the software. Back then, every frame was a different layer (we hadn’t discovered video layers yet), so we had to make up many mental mnemonics in order to be able to manage the files and export the frames in order, one at a time.
We were shuttling between Mumbai and Ahmedabad very frequently. In the summer of ’15, Kalp started work on his graduation project, ‘Rajbari’. At the time, we had a flat in Ahmedabad and invited three second years to hang back during the holidays and help with the animatic. Isha Mangalmurti, Gaurav Wakankar and Anwaar Alam are now all Ghost partners, so one can definitely trace the beginnings of the studio to this summer.
After ‘OK Kanmani’, we repeated the process with ‘Double Barrel’, a Malayalam feature which needed an expository opening animated segment. It was much more whimsical than ‘OK Kanmani’, and furthered our animation chops a little.
Mumbai has a crazy do it now (right now) energy, with a lot of requirements and a lot of expectations of quality. This meant we got a lot of practice, with many different kinds of briefs. By winter 2015, we decided that we needed to take it easy, already, and focus our newfound skills on making a film. We managed to convince some excellent students still studying at NID to come over to Kolkata and work on the still hypothetical film in the summer of 2016.
Right out the door, it must be said that we were incredibly, almost naively optimistic about how easy the process would be. We miscalculated budgets, finishing dates and effort needed, and while it’s slightly funny to talk about all that in hindsight, we hope it is of help to anyone starting out or wading (haha) through a personal project whose scale and scope does little else but intimidate.
Climate Change and Kolkata
When we assembled a team of 9 people to work on the film in the summer of 2016, we didn’t have any ready story to begin work with. Upamanyu, Kalp and Nikunj Patel were graduates, Gaurav Wakankar and Anwaar Alam (who would later become partners at the Ghost Studio) had finished their third year of study, and Shreeya Wagh, Deepti Sharma, Saket Ghaisas and Sharath Ravishankar had just wrapped up their second year of study.
We met frequently on the NID campus and thrashed out potential story ideas. The loose brief we gave ourselves was that we should come up with a story that fits within four minutes. The irony of that is not lost on us.
We also decided that a good place for all of us to sit together and work would be Kolkata. The year before, we had constructed an internship around the pre production of Kalp’s graduation project, ‘Rajbari’. Isha Mangalmurti (also a partner now), Gaurav and Anwaar had worked on this and we based ourselves out of our flat in Ahmedabad. But with more people joining the team, we felt it would be good to have more space to both work and live. Kalp and Upamanyu, both being from Kolkata, could stay in their respective homes. Luckily, we were generously offered a workspace by Jayanth Govindaraju, who owns an office space in the commercial building adjacent to Upamanyu’s residential complex. It was admittedly a little cramped, but everyone could set up and it had a lot of eateries nearby. We also found a living space for all the folks coming to Kolkata to work, which we rented, and Nikunj stayed with Upamanyu for the two months of production.
Since the plan to go to Kolkata had solidified, it also began to figure that it would be interesting to base the still unformed film in the city. It would be easy, educational even, for everyone to go out on research trips, go out into the streets, sketch and feed all that information back into the film. It would, we hoped, make for a very specific and flavoured story.
In that vein, we proposed a lot of ideas set in the city. Some concepts were period pieces, some involved contemporary characters exploring the supernatural.
Then, we read an article about an island called Ghoramara in The Sundarbans. Here’s a link to a more recent article on the same subject.
The Sundarbans: the collective name for the interminable mangrove forests spanning across the largest delta in the world. The Ganga and Brahmaputra merge and meet the sea, bringing in colossal amounts of sediment from all over the subcontinent. This leads to the most spectacular and surreal network of islands and distributaries. The area is incredibly rich in flora and fauna, but the shifting tides and storms make it a very visceral and perpetually nervous place to live in. The human residents of these islands rely heavily on the mangrove forests for their resources.
Ghoramara island was observably shrinking due to sea level rise, leaving hundreds of people permanently displaced. While we had learnt enough in school and afterwards about global warming, this was probably the first time we realised it has links to mass migration.
This tunnelled our vision significantly. The Sundarbans is just to the south of Kolkata. If the swelling sea could obliterate the Sundarbans, surely it would reach Kolkata in a blip. What would a flooded Kolkata actually look like? What’s more, where would the people of the Sundarbans go? Their northward fleeing would definitely send them through Kolkata. Would the people of Kolkata welcome them, understand them? When the flooding begins, how many people would stay in Kolkata, and how many could or would leave? The questions dominoed into bigger, scarier questions.
And then there are the Tigers.
The Sundarbans have a very large population of Royal Bengal Tigers. The human tiger conflict is especially stark in the region. Humans, as mentioned earlier, need to keep entering the tiger’s habitat for their livelihoods, and the tigers too are especially aggressive (studies indicate it may be attributed to the salinity of the water).
We figured that when the flooding would hit the Sundarbans, the tigers too would be forced to move north… Right into Kolkata. Right into our homes. Showing this situation could be a very significant and necessary look at what the future holds for us.
Here, we had a log line that everyone was excited by.
Writing
The first obvious necessity was to translate our fears into film, and make sure our audience shared that kind of foreboding. We decided early on that the film would structurally be similar to a horror or monster film.
When we wrote early drafts of the script, we had a few constants in mind. People. An abandoned Kolkata. Tigers. Stand off. What followed was a few fairly tepid single conflict narratives where the humans and tigers fight and one tiger comes to the rescue.
Dissatisfied, we tried looking at the broader themes of the story. We got obsessed with ideas like balance and action vs inaction in the face of definite doom. When we take something from nature, or when nature takes something from us, how do the mechanisms of compensation play out? We read that when mass extinction events occur, a lot of ‘super-species’ emerge, rapid mutations to give the surviving species a better chance at surviving the new circumstances.
We took a closer look at the mythology in the Sundarbans for ideas. We found the stories of Dakkhin Rai and Bonobibi, and the strained but reverential position of tigers in local storytelling. We read ‘The Hungry Tide’ by Amitav Ghosh, followed by his book length essay, The Great Derangement’. We wouldn’t be able to tell you where, but we read somewhere about a villager recounting with great terror a tiger walking across the water as if it were a sheet of glass, coming straight at him. Somewhere it clicked that a tiger that can walk on water might be an interesting way of visualising that ‘super-species’, to whom all the new water wouldn’t be a bother at all. What kind of a character would such a fortunate tiger be? An even more brutal force of nature, or a benevolent god?
When we went ahead with animation in the summer of 2016, we worked off a much simpler script. As time passed, we realised another crucial aspect of post climate change life: choices. What do you keep, what do you leave behind? Who do you save, who do you sacrifice? The pursuit of self preservation will be a much more brutal, animalistic affair. What if the animals are more generous than the people in that situation? What if both sides cause grievous imbalances?
On the subject of balance, two objects started playing key roles. Arms, and meat. They became very important to us, as you’ll find in the film. Essentially, it became a core idea that the food chain as we know it has been upended by climate change. Tigers eat people, people eat tigers. Pure, unbridled ecological chaos.
This is when the script really expanded, and we added characters. These characters, we decided, would have to make very extreme choices in order to survive. Like ‘127 Hours’ levels of choices. The film instantly stretched from a conservative four minutes to a ludicrous ten and a half.
Eventually, we had a script where every character plays a definite part and stands for something. We also went about it in a very slapdash way, adding whole new scenarios well after animation had progressed, purely based on a discussion or two. We came up with our ending with two months to go till deadline. We would not recommend this. We added shots, character moments and even the ending shots without bothering to revise the script, but almost working on it like an improvised play. While we find this approach works for us sometimes, it’s better for timelines and everyone’s morale to keep things methodical.
Storyboarding
The storyboard of the film too happened in a very make it up as you go along way. This was mainly because we were hoping that we’d spend as little time in pre-production as possible, race forwards to animation and wrap up the film by the end of the year. By this point, you’re not allowed to laugh at us any more on this subject.
The first draft of the storyboard was, therefore, very all over the place in terms of language. Storyboards are really worth investing that extra time to get it right, because this is where the edit and cinematography get locked for good. In draft one, we had all sorts of incoherent angles, the camera traveling to places it needn’t just because we could draw it so.
Over time, it became more and more important to keep the camera low down, only in places it could meaningfully be set up in the real world. We had a frivolous number of ‘god’s eye views’ (shots where the camera is directly overhead) for no good reason, so those were the first to go in later drafts. Upamanyu also spent some time in between working on storyboards for live action films with the renowned Tamil director, Mani Ratnam. Hearing him articulate his ‘why’s of camera blocking, foregrounding and edit pacing was an education in itself, and it helped ‘Wade’ immensely.
We decided to open the film with a good minute of vistas of the city. We challenged ourselves to make the film without any opening paragraph of text, but instead, we wanted to drop the viewer into the city and let them explore, find details, writings on walls, damaged shop fronts, train timetables, and figure out for themselves what the history of the space could be.
One very interesting cinematic choice we made earlier on was to make the film in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Because it doesn’t give you the luxury of a wide vista, it packs your characters very close together with no room to breathe, adding to the claustrophobic, helpless feeling of being trapped with a tiger. What’s more, we’re not much used to seeing the ratio anymore, so it causes instant discomfort. Something doesn’t quite feel right. Good.
Whenever we wanted to add a sequence, or a situation, we’d hastily add boards for just that scene, sometimes even storyboard it directly on the Photoshop timeline while beginning animation for the scene/shot. We definitely advise against this approach, despite the fact that it seems to have worked out for us.
Character Design
We spent very little time on character design, just going for it at breakneck speed in the summer of 2016. Back then, we did make some model sheets in the traditional sense, but didn’t iterate enough and ended up with generic, unnecessarily stylised characters.
The fact that we had no consistent model sheets meant that every animator had too much leeway to interpret the characters, especially the tertiary ones. This was bad news later on when we had a more solid idea about the aesthetics of the characters, and we had to go over most of the old animation again.
When we revisited the characters post crowdfunding, the main thing that changed was the level of detail. The humans seemed to demand more imperfections, details of anatomy and skin disease and hunger. The tigers too needed to be more real, feeding off legitimate structure and musculature, and have distinctly wet fur.
Later on, as we were inventing entire sequences on the fly, we didn’t even have model sheets for the new and improved characters. Since they sort of fed off our usual drawing style, we animated entire shots, close ups and all, purely on instinct. This was much to the chagrin of Shaheen, who had joined production at this point. We would only give him beginning and end frame layouts, and he was somehow expected to complete everything in between while staying ‘on model’. We definitely learned the value of a good model sheet at this point, and made sure that we did future collaborative projects after we sorted out a good pre production base.
Eventually, we were quite happy with the legitimacy of the characters, and really loved them for their characteristics and quirks. We could only hope that the minor inconsistencies stemming from the lack of method in this phase don’t detract too heavily from the viewing experience.
The Girl on the Raft, our ‘protagonist’, this 12 year old girl gets left behind to face off against a deadly tiger after he kills her closest companion and forces the rest of the human group to hide in the nearest building. She’s blind, and needs to be taken everywhere on a raft made of plastic bottles: something so ruinous to the ecosystem ironically serves as her ark. She’s quite helpless, as we all are in the face of climate change. Even her weapon is next to useless to fend off a tiger.
Dadar is a hungry force of nature with a dark past with humans, which causes him to ‘collect’ arms as trophies.We wrote a chunk of the film while taking the Double Decker Express from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, so we named a couple of characters after the stations of Mumbai that we were passing, hence his name. He’s seemingly immune to pain and assault, and has numerous ticks and mannerisms that show his state of mind.
Teesta was named after the tigress we studied in Alipore Zoo, She is a benevolent mother, almost a deity, who can walk on water. She needed to be distinct from all the other tigers, from her colour to her stripe patterns, from her structure to little details like her upswept mane (all the other tigers’ manes sag, heavy with water).
The Human Group
We wanted every person in the group to have a distinct role in the survival of the team.
The Man in the Mask appears to be the lead scout. He wears a mask behind his head to scare tigers trying to attack from behind, tricking the tiger into thinking it is being watched.
The Sickle Woman is the companion of the Girl on the Raft, and pulls her plastic lifeboat wherever she goes. She’s fiercely protective of the young girl, and her weapon of choice is a sickle.
The Vest Man is the muscle of the group. He’s in charge of gathering food, and seems to be the only one in the group who is in good shape.
The Old Lady is the brains of the organisation, and is respected by all. Her most important job is the rationing of food, and she is often seen at her boti (a vertical butchering blade) carefully slicing food into equal portions. She wears found sunglasses to add to her look of authority.
The Bundle Woman is a nervous, middle aged lady whose main moment in the film is stumbling across a mysterious maroon bundle on top of a garbage heap. It was important that she look perpetually nervous and under-confident.
The Old Man and the Teenage Girl are companions who join the group a little later. One has sunken eyes hidden by a headscarf, while the other has perennially wide, surprised eyes. In all the human characters, we’ve tried to show the effects of hunger, water logging and many many damaging years of living life on the edge of survival.
Look Development
We did some early concept art and drawings of the broad story beats.
When we assembled the first trailer for the crowdfunding campaign, we had to work fast to fix colour palettes and an overall style. Since ‘horror’ was our starting point, we ended up with fairly grim, desaturated colours. If you look at it now, it definitely doesn’t deliver the same sense of heat and stench that the current palette does.
After watching the crowdfunding trailer many times over, we decided to ask Sandhya Prabhat for help. She lived in Chennai at the time, and is an illustrator and animator with an incredible sense of colour. Feeding off an excellent understanding of light, she works with the most unexpected colours that we find very difficult to imagine but still manages to make them work in both whimsical and fully realistic situations.
We sent her some notes about what the film was trying to achieve with its look and feel, which may have been the first time that we as directors properly articulated what we needed from the graphic universe of the film.
We clearly harped on about realism and legitimacy and went around the city taking a lot of photographs and discussing what we found as patterns in all the photos. We asked Sandhya to be very loyal to the colours of the city as is, the dirty green and brown water we were used to seeing during monsoons, and the blazing white sky (never ever blue) which is the surest indicator of heat in the pictures. The overexposed whites with equally cool shadows worked to make the environment feel truly post global warming.
Sandhya got it right in the first try. Everything we did there on, we just had to drag her sheet into Photoshop and pick colours.
Background Art
For those of you (most of you) who aren’t familiar with the city, Park Street is a road in north/central Kolkata. It has all the good restaurants and bars, fancy shops and iconic cafes. ‘Flurys’ is more than a cafe/restaurant on Park Street, it’s a landmark. Its chandeliers and bright pink signage are familiar to all in the city. When we were writing the film and looking for an ideal location to be the stage for the main events in the story, Park Street hit us immediately. It would be interesting and even sad, we thought, to have such grim things happening in an area which most people in the city associate with good times and pleasure.
This process, too, had a bit of a false start. Since ‘realism’ was our watchword, it was important that our ‘map’ of the setting was solid. Therefore it seemed like a good idea to reconstruct Park Street in 3D, so we’d never miss a shop or a window regardless of where we set up the camera. To this end, Deepti and Shreeya went and took about 300 photos of Park Street, and we made an orthographic plan based on that. Afterwards, we handed over the plan and reference photos to Rahul Parihar, a veritable genius in Blender. He whipped up a good 3D model of the buildings fairly quickly, and we planned to take renders from it and touch it up slightly for our backgrounds.
When we did all of that for trailer 1, we couldn’t help but feel it wasn’t working well. For one, we still didn’t know enough about how to replicate real world lensing in a 2D frame, meaning our horizon lines and eye levels defied all rules in a bad way. The scale of the characters to the settings were completely off, and as an aesthetic, painting over the 3D models was costing us more time than it was saving us.
Once we had Sandhya’s sheets for the colours, we made many more trips to Park Street, with cameras and sketchbooks. We figured out, for starters, how horizon lines work and how to come up with a more realistic sense of relative scale. We slowly managed to make our environments much more congested and believable.
Especially for the opening montages, we scouted around for good candidates for locations, basing a lot of art directly on photos that we were taking. Kolkata has a lot of texture, and is very rough around the edges. There aren’t really any right angles, no unblemished wall. Peeling posters reveal more peeling posters underneath them. Wires and cables smother the city in what feels like a gigantic black cobweb. There are frequently dazzling bursts of primary colours, garishly green or pink buildings in the middle of the earthy yellows of crumbling brick and plaster.
A lot of very talented artists worked on the backgrounds for ‘Wade’. The first bit of help we got was from Mandar Mhaskar and Sushant Ahire. They got in touch via Instagram in early 2018, and their sense of lighting and atmosphere had us sold immediately. The next year, Mandar resumed some background work, and a lot of heavy lifting closer to the deadline year was done by Yamini Sujan, doing her second year internship with us. Yamini too has a knack for making beautifully atmospheric colour thumbnails, which she’d pass on to us for refining. This helped us speed up the process significantly.
Animation
The animation process too happened in fits and starts. We had a huge push in the summer of 2016, with Upamanyu, Kalp, Nikunj, Gaurav, Anwaar, Shreeya, Saket, Deepti and Sharath working on the line tests. It was easy to be very pleased with ourselves, because back then, the intended runtime was much shorter. We covered most of the shots in the erstwhile shot breakdown, and ended the summer in Kolkata on a very cheerful note. Most of the animation was done on video layers in Photoshop, while Gaurav and Anwaar are more comfortable with TVPaint. We’d frequently export mp4s of the line tests to replace them in the animatic on Premiere to get a sense of how the continuity was working out.
We then assembled the trailer for our crowdfunding campaign. We fixed on a brush and line weight for the cleanups, a modification of the default chalk brush in Photoshop. We also fixed a brush size range of between 4 to 7 px, 5 being the usual. 4px would work if a character were very far away and 6/7px would help in extreme close ups so that the line work didn’t look too delicate. All cleanups were done on Photoshop, regardless of which software was used to do the line tests. It would get a little cumbersome to export png sequences out of TVPaint and bring them into Photoshop for cleanups, but it was important that the animators were comfortable, so we didn’t enforce the slightly ungainly workflow of Photoshop animation on them. In case you’re interested in knowing more about animating in Photoshop, here’s a link to Alex Grigg’s excellent tutorial. We learnt most of our methods right here, so huge ups to Alex.
The first notes we made after the crowdfunding campaign was that we might need a slightly higher frame rate. A lot of the trailer shots were on 4s, and for a more natural brand of motion we upgraded most of the shots to 3s and sometimes even 2s. Our cleanups were also suffering from a large amount of jitter, but that got better with practice. We cracked an effective cleanup method where we would only clean up a single part of the character all the way to the end. The eye, or the ear, for instance. That way we would be sure that at least that portion was ‘boil free’. If there were still significant jitters with details dancing back and forth which became more apparent in the cleanup stage than the much less precise line tests, it would help to find the error frame and then go ahead and erase it and make a direct in between using onion skins.
Animating tigers is very challenging. Quadrupedal characters are a bit of a pain to begin with, so while we were fortunate enough to never have to make any feet or paws (except for the magical tigress), we still had to bring in a lot of weight and get the way tigers move and behave just right. We got down on all fours and acted it out very frequently.
The biggest issue with tigers is that they have stripes. This means that every single stripe on every single tiger has to be animated frame by frame, without shrinking or stretching, without jittering and without disappearing between frames. Tigers also have white patches around their jaw and cheek, and above their eyes. These too had to be animated consistently. A film with, let’s say, black panthers, would have the benefit of not having these two extra processes in the pipeline.
Next on board with the animation was Shaheen, who worked for a couple of months off the layouts we mentioned earlier. Now Shaheen has a completely different workflow. He works exclusively in open source software such as Krita and Blender, and he really pushes the limits of what can be done in them. He handled a lot of shots with subtle performance, breathing, as well as out and out action shots.
Balaram J Warrier and Partha Mahanta joined the animation team in the summer of 2017. They handled a lot of human shots, and were massively helpful in helping us finish a giant shot of a group of tigers slithering through the water, resembling most closely a pit of snakes. This shot alone took the entire studio a month to make.
The year after that, Neeraj Bhattacharya and Arkapriya Koley joined in. By this time, we finally had enough cleaned animation to begin colouring and adding effects animation to. Water, obviously, plays a huge part in the film. Every shot in which a character interacts with the surface of the water, needed meticulous water animation: splashes, ripples, and wakes. We would use the timed line tests and animate water over it, going from rough lines to solid fills to highlights. The shots really began to come alive when the water was no longer just a flat surface, but had physics of its own!
Amalendu Kaushik joined us shortly after graduating. He spent a month on the animation, mainly on the shadows, highlights, stripes and patches.
The last round of animation had Arindam Datta, Ashil Shaji, Yamini Sujan and Addayta Biswas handling a variety of tasks from effects animation to stripes/patches and shading. Anwaar, Gaurav and Isha used to keep plugging back into the animation process from time to time, helping out with new shots that suddenly mushroomed in the middle of our process.
Production Management
All in all, ‘Wade’ had 151 shots. It was important to break these tasks into smaller tasks and always give it the illusion of being manageable. Constructing a good production management spreadsheet is an art form in itself, and we had three iterations of the master sheet for ‘Wade’. It helps to also use pie charts or whatever else floats your boat to have a visualisation of your progress.
Compositing
This is the part where we finally see all the work combined to form actual shots and gives us immense pleasure to see a piece of animation move on the background art with all the effects, gradients and elements all stitched in together. It’s a tedious process, but when one sees the environment that was created from nothing into a real life universe that was created, it makes it worthwhile.
Getting good at compositing has one one major criterion: one has to observe everything around you as if your eyes were the camera and notice how things move and adjust to it. The physical world has a lot of rules, and Kalp, the compositor for ‘Wade’ had to interpret all these parameters in the language of Adobe AfterEffects to get the believability we were aiming for.
‘Wade’ has a very live action approach towards blocking/lensing its shots. Since we did not have an actual camera, getting the shots to move and feel like it was set up in an actual 3d surrounding was a challenge.
Almost every shot has ‘water’ in it, and it was important to represent that in a way it gelled well with the detailed background paintings. After various attempts (should the water be a 3D simulation?), we finally cracked a simple method of representing the stagnant water which played a crucial role throughout the film. Some default filters on the ‘reflection’ pngs on AfterEffects like turbulent displacement and displacement mapping were used to get the ‘rippling’ effect, especially when there is disturbance in the water. There is a lot of that throughout the film! Another trick that made the film more real and lifelike was to add a minimal hand held camera effect to the shots. Other camera jerks and violent shakes added more legitimacy to the shots later on. A nature documentary like depth of field was also one of the things we tried to achieve, with plenty of focus pulls here and there to guide the eye subliminally.
Compositing a large film like ‘Wade’ had never been done before by us. It had to be streamlined. Proper shot numbering and excel sheets helped majorly. Every shot had a separate project file to reduce the load on the computer. We had to get economical with the process, and with some solid advice from Troy, we were able to streamline our process without having to upgrade our computers. Layers of effects animation and reflections slowly started to make the universe of ‘Wade’ more believable. A lot of the composite happened simultaneous to the colour and cleanups. We had bursts of progress happening initially, after which we would assess the amount of work left (and frighten ourselves) and then proceed. The 3 trailers that we released helped in developing and strengthening the composite and its finesse. It got better with every trailer! Some elements which would not make sense on its own were coming together well when all the layers integrated together. Subtle flickers, gradients, grains, light burns, motion blurs, parallax, etc made it look legitimate and ‘whole’.
Sound and Music
Sound is such a crucial element in this film, and we were lucky to have Troy Vasanth dedicate a lot of time to this project. Fans of his ever since we saw his graduation film with Rajesh Thakare, ‘Good Morning Mumbai’ while we were still students, we started off by asking him for helping us out with the sound design for the second trailer in 2017. He managed to put together a very eerie, tense track which really suited the mood we were going for.
After that, it took us some time to get the full lineup ready for Troy, because once sound design begins, it’s extremely irksome for the sound designer if some new shots come in or a chunk gets deleted. In late March 2019, we were finally ready with a lineup of all the line tests, effectively locking the film’s run time. We took the render to Mumbai to have a one on one sessions with Troy in his setup to brief him about what we needed.
With zero sound design experience ourselves, we had a very steep learning curve about how to communicate with a sound designer. Troy was pretty much hitting the spot on the first try with most of the scenes. He broke down the film into themes and movements, and composed little recurring cues and motifs to nudge the audience into latching onto the plot better. The supernatural themes were the toughest to get right because while suggesting fantasy, the soundscape could never get too fairy tale-esque.
Tour, Festivals and Release
When the sound design came through, we spent a couple of days putting it all together, checking sync and doing test screenings on our office TV. And that was it! Three and a half years later, ‘Wade’ was rendered out, ready for the world.
One of Ghost Animation’s most significant steps was to go on a nationwide tour with our animated short films. Usually when a film is done, you send it to festivals and then off it goes online. We tried adding an extra step to the films’ life cycle, while hoping to do something for the visibility of animated shorts made in India. Along with ‘Wade’, Isha’s animated documentary ‘Beyond Borders’, Gaurav’s thriller short ‘Mother’ and Shaheen’s sci fi comedy ‘Watchmaker: At Time’s End’, we put out a combined trailer and opened ticket sales. To our knowledge, animated short films have never been on tour in India before, so it was obviously a little iffy as to whether we’d be able to make any significant sales.
To our absolute delight, ticket sales were off the charts. We had to double our venues, and while we initially planned 4 cities, we ended up playing in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Kochi, Kozhikode, Bengaluru, Vijayawada, and Kolkata, with 28 fully sold out screenings. The venues varied from college auditoriums to bookstores to cafes/bars with projection facilities, and we also prepared merchandise to sell at the venues. All in all, it was a tremendous experience, since all the planning, promotion and merchandising was entirely done in house. Of course, it was absolutely incredible to be able to meet so many people and see their reactions first hand!
With that, ‘Wade’ was geared up for its festival run. While FilmFreeway is our main portal and it has a very potent list of festivals, we referred to a lot of solid lists and even put Vimeo thumbnails of widely selected films under the magnifying glass to find a good lineup of festivals to apply for.
A lot of dreams have legitimately come true, and within a few months, ‘Wade’ has already made it to so many festivals that we’ve looked up to since forever. Selections so far include Festival D’Annecy, ITFS Stuttgart, Krakow Film Festival, Animayo and many others (which we are not allowed to reveal yet, but we’re excited!).
Conclusion
Congratulations for making it to the end! We hope this was an interesting read for you, and if you’re not into animation, we’re sorry if some parts were too heavy on jargon. Still, hopefully you managed to get an in-depth look at how a film goes from idea to execution. Clearly, there are a lot of pitfalls along the way, and nothing is absolute or correct. That’s what makes it fun though! ‘Wade’ was such a central part of our lives for such a long time that we’re a little sad to be done with it. However, we’ve learned so much that we’ll definitely be able to move forward into new film projects with much more understanding and a sense of what to expect. If you, the reader, are planning to make an animated short film or are in the midst of making one, we really hope this helps in some way! We can’t wait to see what you come up with :)
If you have any questions or tips, please don’t hesitate to get in touch on wadethefilm@gmail.com. Also, do come and say hey on Instagram, where we’ll keep sharing process images and news about the film.
