61 avenue house is what they call it …. my new place of residence. A fairly large sharehouse that clearly used to be an old peoples home. The narrow corridors, the absence of locks on most doors, the support railing on the side of the toilet, the emergency calling buttons, the abandoned elevator, my loneliness, state of mind and the liquid soup for dinner has seemed to added 50 years on me.

Dont plan on spending too much time here during the day and as long as i stick to that plan, i can probably live through this more or less depressing experience. For the first time in 9 months, i am alone – all alone and if there is anything i cannot stand, its loneliness.

The past one week has been quite daunting with regards to the course. Exploring possible directions for research is one thing but locating the GAP in the body of knowledge and making my contribution to the community of artists is another. I guess, i just feel a little intimidated by the presence of such well informed people who seem to know everything about everything.

The talks from Malcolm Turner (animation posse), NextWave, Stephan, Nick have been quite enlightning. However, Stephan and Nick’s presentation seemed more valid to what we were looking for and they gave us a very indepth look at what was involved in the reseach process.

At the end of all the presentations, me and old buddy dillemma sat together for hours at stretch trying to figure out what was it that i could write about for the next six months. I have decided on investigating offscreen space + abstracting screen edge + suggesting change in the visual systems and conventions of watching narratives.

Still staying at jasmines place …. but hopefully not for long

Back in melbourne…… a not too long forgotten smell of bars and busy coffee shops at the corner of every street was overwhelmingly nostalgic ( i wonder if i can use that word considering my very short term affair of less than one year with this city ). I spent most of the first day sleeping and making sure i wasnt getting in the way of the happy couple who had most graciously let me crash at their place.

Couldnt help but get back on Swanston Street as soon as i was over the jetlag, and realized how Melbourne was truely ‘a city of experiences’. The only way to discover this wonderful city was to walk and walk and keep walking … never letting any alleyway slip by, never letting any pub undiscovered, never letting any busker go unnoticed.

As wonderful walking in melbourne really is, you do happen to come across the most annoying skateboard junkies who are always looking for 50Cents for a ride home or the occasional couple from manhattan who are desperately looking for some pot. Not to worry though – a month in this city is more than enough to get familiar but dont let familiarity breed contempt is what i say…..

Another one of my aptly timed conversation with muqeem while waiting for the girls to show up at the boardwalk parking lot. This time our ramble went on about for an hour and a half about the importance of layout over content and vice versa.

The big fan of ‘Typography’ and ‘Layout’ that i am, i find myself arguing till the end that ‘Content’ is secondary to its layout.

I have been taught otherwise and instructed to hold precious ‘the message, the content and the body of information’ …. but i realize that today information moves at an extraordinarily fast pace. However, the recipients of the same move at twice the pace, which makes it almost impossible to attract them to boring gray matter. It has become a challenge to make an audience take notice of a body of text and therefore it has to be presented rather intelligently to make the audience stop and take notice.

I guess, we also tend to forget that over the many years of reading and writing, man has developed a recognition of even the most obscure letterforms faster and efficiently. It doesnt matter if the tagline to the audi ad is written in reverse or lopsided, the message will and does get through as easily as it would when written in its conventional and correct form.

So yea Muqeem – there you go, thats my side of the arguement… thanks for bringing up another one of those conversations.

Distributed Production House Methodology and ‘telling it right’

Just before i flew out of dubai, the team at work landed on a very exciting collaboration with atomfilms.com to co-produce and animate an internet series. The series would deal with the midlife crisis of an all american extreme sports hero who for the first time in his daredevil career had started getting cold feet and shivering knees before any stunt. The series of episodes would be a humorous take on the life of the character, his friends, his predicament and dillemma of living upto the expectations of his fans.

My first read at the script made me wonder if this was going to be yet another Johnny Bravo and i realized eventually that it would have to be quite a significant effort to bring it anywhere close to a production of that quality ( not aesthetically ). Why?

Well…… considering that the series was being produced for an extrovert american audience in one of the most introvert and conservative part of the world… i was sure that the project had a few interesting hurdles in store for us.

A brief example of how conservative the United Arab Emirates is, exhibits well from the fact that www.atomfilms.com is amongst the forbidden sites to which access have been blocked to internet users in the emirates (for fear that a few productions on the site may have content that would be considered offensive to islam or the culture of the region)

So the questions i ask myself again and again is –
-Sitting in such a dissimilar part of the world, how was it that we were supposed to understand the ‘true californian lifestyle’ of our protagonist?
-In the world of animation where everything exists because the production intends it to, how do we know or how do we feel the vibe of what needs to be put in to this production ?
-Would ‘we’ the producers and animators who are visually illiterate to creative vandalism, surf culture, skateboarders, extreme sports, the slang and lingo of the streets be able to portray the same to the literate masses of the USA and most importantly ‘ the world ‘ ?
- Arent we at the risk of passing on a very misleading message to the future audience of what extreme sports in the USA is all about ?

Ofcourse, our assurance lies in the fact that the series is being co produced and we would receive our share of valuable information from our partners i.e atomfilms and our reliance on the information from internet and films should not be undermined either.

The predicament that arises from that however is the genuiness of all our information sources and in the broader sense the fact that ‘all the information we require, comes to us filtered and biased.

The only reason that the productions of this sort gets outsourced to countries abroad is to make it feasible ….but does the monetary cost effectiveness come at the cost of possibly misleading an audience?

The bigger picture really is… how do we go about enhancing simmilar creative collaborations around the world and yet be able to ‘tell it right’

Final Fantasy has had issues initially with the fact that it was being made for an asian audience – says muqeem….
what made them change ? it was being made in hawaii for an asian audience ..

jungle book made for an international audience but was the true essence of india understood and depicted aptly ?

road to eldorado – character has a brooklyn accent but she is mayan ??

result of globalization ? or just plain misinterpretiaion ??

are we looking at an americanized version of stories of the world ?? is that fair ? even if its made for an american audience ???? arent they also telling an hawaian

more research on that from my end to figure out where and how that goes….