Journalism of Courage
Paresh Parekh who has been training animators for six years now says that the art is more about presenting your emotions than just technical expertise
Replacing comics from its vintage fan following,animation had dawned on to India with a loud bang. Comics could never match the bait of seeing a swinging spidey or a giant robot on Doordarshan,instead of reading them in print. A whole decade later,unlike what most people think,animation is not just about gawky lifeless figures,managing frames,sketches and expertise in the technical side.
An enthusiastic actor,Parekh soon started working with children. I worked with children for eight years,and I got to know so much from them. In fact,those years have shaped my acting career today and animation later on. I understood how animation works only after I interacted with these children. At the workshop Parekh will be talking about a milieu of fields to work on from creating advertisements,to creating characters to putting emotions in them. Explaining how acting and animation are deeply linked he says ,To put life into a life less thing,requires skills that are beyond just creating a character technically. One has to emote it too,and this is where acting comes into play. Parekh teaches his students using the method of role play how to actually feel like the character,act out that bit and then go on to create it on the technical side. No wonder then the characters like Aladdin,Bagheera have transcended the scopes of screens and related to everyone so well. So what does he think of animation in India today? There are stories waiting to be told in India. Each of our Panchatantra stories can be made into fantastic animation show-reels,but what is required is just a quick hand and a knack to capture the emotions correctly, he replies.
