Today we complete eight days as we attempt to tell a Kom tribal story from Manipur through a medium which is completely unexplored by us - that is sand.

We started off  researching information that would help us to construct the story board and character design for the film along with understanding, questioning why  sand is being used as the only medium and how it gives justice to the film. Things began to have clarity after watching sand animation films which gave us  ideas of how story telling is achieved through this medium.

As we started animating, my partner Jaai and I tried our hands for the very first time with sand and we tried to make a small animation which was not so good in the end but responding to Tara’s kind appreciation towards it motivated us to get started with our first shot.

Working with the sand, we got to know about the property of it and how the layers of sand are used to show the depth or dark tones in the film. The process was surely a painstaking one as each and every frame was supposed to be wiped out and  before starting to redraw it all over again, and again. At the end, there is no such joy  as watching a completed shot which comes to life as sand rolls from one frame to another.

Thank you

Akshay  S. Malotkar

The screenings today presented a genre of indigenous film-making, where films are made by, or in collaboration with, indigenous storytellers to retell their stories for local target audiences.

Tara showed a few sample short animation films made in Canada there were based on Native American folklore and the well known Raven character that had been made by Winazi James 
including Bald Eagle (2006), by Winadzi James, available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2IWV24CWHk, and 

Raven Tales Bald Eagle Part 2 (2006), available from:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlsIgFuRTes

How Coyote Got his Cunning (2011), available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d2Zh318kRY

The session ended with a screening of The Tallest Story Competition (2006), a collection of five animated Adivasi folktales that Tara had been involved with.  More information about the production company that made the series, West Highland Animation in Scotland can be found here.