Around this time last year, I was fresh out of college, freelancing as an illustrator, hardly entertaining my pipedream about wanting to direct my animated short. Pages and pages of artwork and research lay on my hard drive untouched, with no reason to be fiddled with. My folders had been retitled to 'passion project to work on in my spare time' with finality, and any plans of being a filmmaker had been shelved until further notice.
It wasn't until AniMela brought the Annecy Festival's International Mifa Campus to India that I began to consider there might be a glimmer of hope for this project, which pushed me to apply, and to my good fortune, get selected. Therein lay the rebirth of 'भरतीच्या लाटा - Rising Tides', the animated short I am currently developing!
The Mifa Campus that took place in January this year was revolutionary for me and this project. Getting mentored by the wonderful Johanna Goldschmidt, delphine FARHI NICOLINI and Reza Riahi was incredibly enriching, as they helped us refine our projects and make them 'pitch-perfect'. I had the most fantastic company through this workshop – Krishna Chandran A. Nair, Isha Mangalmurti, Shreeya Wagh, Debjyoti Saha, Dhruv, Sruti Menon and Rituparna Sarkar (all straight-up rockstars), who made the entire experience so so fun :)
As the year went on, one thing led to another (which I might just ramble on about in another post) – the project travelled to Annecy and won an award (???), my army of one became bigger, Studio Mikudi came into existence, and my life turned into a massive crash-course in animation, direction, production, visual development, writing and all its miscellaneous facets. There's been ups and downs, it's been scary and full of imposter-syndrome motivated meltdowns every week, but it's still everything I dreamed about, and for that, I'm eternally grateful <3
I'd like to thank AniMela and the Festival international du film d'animation d'Annecy for everything it did for me, and especially Neha Jain and Anne-Gaelle Kerhoas-Doshi for being fairy godmothers through the entirety of this adventure.
Onto the most interesting part of this post, AniMela is currently accepting proposals for animation projects till 20 Nov 2024, and if you have an idea that you're brewing, I'd definitely push you to apply! Not an exaggeration to say it might be life-changing, because it definitely was for me :) All the best!
