We have been working on a short animated film, called ‘The Sweetmeat Boy’, for the last couple of years. The film will be approximately 2 to 3 minutes long, but has already taken a few thousand hours of learning, conception and execution! From the time we started, we have reshot the same scenes at least ten times; and now that the film is halfway there, we feel ready to share our experiences with those who are interested in this kind of film making, or those who are simply entertained by a good story.

The film is based on a Kannada folk tale that many a grandmother has repeated to her grandchild. It features an Indian version of the classic Eastern European ‘Baba Yaga’ legend, with a sinister hell hag (“Rakshasi ajji” in the Tulu language) terrifying an ‘innocent’, sweetmeat eating boy. It is a story with a strong visual element, and seemed an apt subject for a film. After playing around with a few ideas on how to bring this to life, we made up our minds to experiment with stop motion animation.

The first decision we had to make was around the materials that we were going to use, and the kind of stop motion that this was going to be – hand drawn, clay, silhouette or paper cutout. We zeroed in on clay animation almost immediately, since using real and tactile materials requires a much greater level of interaction with the physical world, providing the story that much more depth.

We decided early on to not use CGI or doctor the pictures we took in any way – all the animation would happen in camera, without anything being removed, added or enhanced. We had to be very careful with our sets and lighting, and figure out ways of hiding supporting harnesses, to avoid changing anything artificially on the computer.

On the left is the first iteration of the set and the puppet. The background here was watercolour on thick paper, with a painted tree and a very unformed puppet. The foliage was real lichen.

The subsequent puppet, on the right, had more articulation and features. The tree was now a combination of a watercolour painting and a clay front. The problem with this puppet was that it had no skeleton to support its extremities. The clay fingers would keep drying and breaking off in our hands.

Then we created a more advanced puppet with modular and movable parts built on a wire skeleton. The arms, fingers, eyes, head and body were all separately baked and put together on an armature that we built with aluminium wire. There was also some fiddling about with cloth and thread to cover the puppet’s modesty. This puppet, while a lot more advanced than the clay one before it, could not move as smoothly as we wanted.
Animating puppets is anything but easy. Every second of filming requires a careful maneuvering of models, and a single faulty movement or a seemingly imperceptible shift in the set, teeming with tiny props, can break the flow completely, negating all the time and effort spent. We got our hands dirty with paints, coloured clay and polymers, picked lichen off of neighbours’ walls, and had countless this-is-the-end type arguments. We created and tore down background after background, stage after stage and remade our models over and over again. Let us not even begin to count the many hours spent brooding over yet another failed attempt. But finally, we had our very first scene. All our hair-tearing and hand-wringing was forgotten when we saw our puppet walking for the very first time – our own mad and tearful “It’s Alive!” moment.

Here is one of the scenes that we later rejected, using the baked puppet and a full clay tree. The sequence comprises of more than a hundred separate photographs, with minute movements between one photo and the next. It is an example of how the tiniest of lapses can lead to the whole scene falling apart. The tree just couldn’t support the moving puppet and began to sag, though that was not apparent while filming. The puppet itself, while much sturdier, had a few problems with its fingers. The tiny baked polymer fingers lacked pliability and the all-important fleshy feel; besides, it didn’t help that they kept slipping off the hair-thin copper wire!

And finally, after about eight iterations, here is our latest tree and puppet. This little guy definitely has it in him to be a star! Although they look similar to the previous version, the tree this time is sturdier and is made of wires and papier-mache instead of clay, and the puppet is a combination of modular polymer and soft clay parts, mounted on an aluminium and metal thread armature. The clothes have also been changed subtly to enable smoother movement.It was interesting for us to review the unavoidable cock-ups of the first few attempts, they showed us not only where we went wrong, but also that in its rawness and honesty, the imperfect thing is sometimes the most perfect. Now when we look at our unformed first puppet, what we see embodied is our initial urge to tell a story, even if that involved a back-breaking process of learning to work with clay. We both agree that in its unabashed authenticity, our first and most flawed puppet is the best one that we have ever made.