ANIMATED SHORT FILM WINS TWO MAJOR AWARDS

 

Thank you! It is incredible. We make these films just for the pure joy of being able to animate while trying to bring awareness to highlight these women and the work they do, who are essentially making it in male-dominated fields and challenging what it means to be a woman in those fields. Even though it’s my name on the certificates, winning these awards is actually a win for the team; the community of creatives who have come together to tell these stories. It's an amazing feeling to feel like we are doing something great and being recognised for it and have our voices heard through these awards. It’s great that animation is being given this prominence. 

 

 

It’s extremely special because we are talking about a very unique Sri Lankan family preserving a very unique dance form; Kandyan dance and traditional dance. It's also unique because of the medium we’ve chosen to tell these stories, through stop motion and experimental animation. What really sets Thaji’s film apart from the other stories of the series is that this film is actually not about her, it’s about her family and highlighting what they’ve done in the field. The story starts with how her grandfather went to villages to learn this dance form that was very limited to being performed at rituals in these villages and how he brought this ritualistic dance to the performance stage and made it accessible to a huge audience. Then the story highlights how now the women in the family, Thaji’s aunt and her sisters are continuing to preserve this art form. That’s what makes it so special. 

 

 

 

The Animate Her series actually started with me being selected for the Creative Heroines workshop by the British Council back in 2019 in Kathmandu, Nepal. It was this week long workshop discussing on who a heroine is and who are South Asian heroines we can look at and at the end of the workshop, we were given a grant to come back home and start a project on these discussions. That’s how the Animate Her series came about. It’s a series of 7 short films of incredible women in various fields. It was difficult to decide who I wanted to feature, there are so many incredible women in Sri Lanka who have been recognised for the work in their field but ultimately, I looked for women who challenged certain stereotypes through education and who came back to provide access to various fields in their work. What brings them all together is that they have created a community within their field. The Animate Her series features Dr. Asha de Vos – Marine biologist, Anya Rathnayake – Wildlife conservationist, Lakmini Wijesundera- Tech entrepreneur, Amila de Mel – Architect, Sybil Wettasinghe - Children’s book author and illustrator, Ramani Muttettuwegama- Lawyer and Thaji Dias - Professional dancer and teacher, Chitrasena Dance School. I think how I chose to tell these stories is also interesting. When I started the series, I didn’t have much confidence to call myself an animator but I wanted to challenge myself and I think this project really pushed me in ways I didn’t imagine was possible. It showed me the potential to tell impactful stories in new and different ways. 

 

 

Yes, it involved a lot of behind-the-scenes work. Similar to any other film production, we had pre-production, production and post production stages. At the pre-production stage I worked on shortlisting the women I wanted to feature in the series and spent time researching and drawing up the questions to ask them. We then coordinated to interview them and once we did the interviews, I spent some time watching them over and over again so I can select the scenes I wanted to animate. There are little moments during these interviews I could immediately visualise the scene and then I had to shuffle the content around to bring a seamless short story together. Once we worked on the script and had a story board made for how each scene would look visually, then the team got together to figure out how we can bring these characters to life. We spent a significant amount of time getting all the sets, props and assets together which took longer than I anticipated.

 

Filming was equally time consuming because stop motion requires a lot of time and patience as it requires us to take still pictures for each frame.  It was actually a big process to get each short film out and I think the main challenge of it all was that I was also learning on the go so everything had to be learnt from scratch! 

 

 

Because I’m a self-taught animator and most of my team consists of architects and cinematographers, mostly all of us are new to animating so we just wanted to experiment with these kinds of mediums and animations because we had the opportunity to learn as much as we could with this series. At the same time, I would also say it was also because of pure necessity! We don’t have the industrial goods we need for animation so we had to rely on local bookshops, hardware stores and craft shops to get the material for us to play around with and see how it works. Ultimately, it was very much the feeling you would get if you were in art class! It has been really fun working with the team trying to figure out how to bring my sketches from the storyboard to life and using mixed mediums helped us learn a lot on the go. 

 

 

The actual film making was and still is incredibly surprising. Stop motion essentially uses inanimate objects that you have to manipulate by hand, frame by frame, and the entire film consist of these series of still photographs you’ve shot that turns into motion. What is surprising, even now, is when we finish and filming and we play it back, the fact that these inanimate objects are actually moving, saying or doing something meaningful is absolutely magical!