नेय्मलस

नेय्मलस started as a live-cum-animated project in 2001 that used the usual photo cutout animation techniques as well as traditional Indian puppetry. The project had to be abandoned because of severe financial crunch that forced us to close our studio Visualcommunications in Bombay and move on to Delhi.

But financial crunch was just the surface cause there were deeper reasons for the failure of this project. Then, in 2001, I think I did not fully understand the full scope of Gandhi's Hindswaraj and its challenge to modernity. (read the notes written in 2001 here) The next five years I struggled to understand the deeper implications of Gandhi's book and its grasp on 'Technology'. In the meanwhile I almost read all the 90 volumes of his published work and several hundred novels especially by Latin American writers as well as Indian and Japanese. I also tried to improve my story telling ability by writing a short novella नेय्मलस that narrates the adventure of a young girl with a Vetal (sort of Jini and obviously based of Vickram and Vetal framework) The story unfolds in the form of twelve episodes at the end of which the full impact and scope of Hindswaraj is arrived at.

The story has a spooky side and each episodes hints at the underlying background intelligence that today orders and realizes everything. I have published some of the rough drafts of the story on-line and can be read at my site here. (these have nothing to do with the actual film whose timeline and story are obviously different but can be seen as a good exercise in storytelling.)

The film will still use the usual photo cutout animation techniques as well as traditional Indian puppetry but most of it will be realized using digital pipeline and CG work flow, and most of it would be done using open-source software 'Blender' and 'Gimp' in particular.

Of course the timing is almost perfect as Hindswaraj completes 100 years in 2009.
Nine years may sound like a long time to get the film going, but it is quite short compared to what it is trying to achieve and the problem it is trying to tackle head on.

There is a progress blog where we will be posting clips, tests, tutorials and workflow discussions on technical bottlenecks that we encounter during the production of the film.
Also please note that it not only uses open-source but also open-form production techniques.

Shaily & Rajiv Mudgal
neymlus@darkwhite.in