Animation Ch 1: Making Moving Things a Vocation

Where pixels dance, pencils blur, and caffeine fuels late-night scanning marathons

The Blue Festival Baptism

My animation journey began with a spectacular baptism by fire—or should I say, baptism by blue. At 18, fresh-faced and blissfully ignorant of what I was getting myself into, I volunteered to create a promo animation for my college festival at NID (National Institute of Design). Our team's color was blue, my basic animation course wasn't even complete, and I had approximately zero clue what I was doing. Perfect conditions for an animator's origin story, right?

With the boundless energy that only exists in teenagers and small nuclear reactors, I dove headfirst into creating this promo. My reasoning was part team contribution, part desperate need to make my mark among peers. My entire understanding of animation at this point was essentially "complicated flipbook," but why let minor details like "knowledge" or "experience" stop me?

Armed with an uplifting Alberto Iglesias track and a rough storyboard connecting different aspects of the promo with simple transitions, I began what would become my first massive lesson in animation: Just animating something is not enough to make an animation.

What I thought would be a modest project quickly ballooned into a 600+ drawing behemoth spanning less than a month of frantic creation. I never anticipated this volume of work, but in retrospect, that ignorance was probably a blessing. (Those pages later became sketchbooks I used throughout college—waste not, want not.)

Seeing me drowning in this ocean of work, my friends (the true heroes of this story—Trina, Wrik, Pooja K, and Jyoti) pitched in with coloring and inbetweens. This was my introduction to another animation truth: no great animation happens in isolation.

The Great Scanning Marathon

After completing the drawings came scanning—another unexpectedly Herculean task. The automatic scanner created an unwanted line down the center of each page, so I had to do everything manually. The animation department kindly allowed me to use three scanners simultaneously, leading to the absurd sight of me prancing around the lab keeping track of page numbers across multiple machines (scanner 1: pages 1-50, scanner 2: pages 51-100, scanner 3: pages 101-150, and so on).

Meanwhile, my friend Delwyn Jude Remedios promised to help with editing and compiling the promo—crucial since I'd never even seen editing software up close at this point. I finished scanning with two days to spare before the deadline, feeling cautiously triumphant.

Then came lesson two: The problems that hinder creation often have nothing to do with the act of creation itself. Between classes the next day, I went to collect my scans only to discover all the computers had been formatted—and yes, my 600+ scans had vanished into the digital ether.

I don't remember my exact reaction, which probably means I was absolutely livid. I returned to class pretending everything was fine while internally accepting defeat, telling everyone my project was too ambitious to complete.

The Push That Changed Everything

That's when I learned lesson three: A good idea and a foolish one are two sides of the same coin; it takes a fool to identify them. Luckily, NID is filled with magnificent fools.

Priyankar Gupta, one of our friendly faculty members, heard about the disaster and approached me with simple instructions: "Skip class, re-scan everything, and make sure your promo screens tomorrow." We were now exactly one day, 600+ scans, and all the editing and compositing away from the deadline.

That was the push I needed. Once again, I found myself bouncing between scanners, but this time with official sanction—nobody else was allowed to use them. As I neared completion of this second scanning marathon, I messaged Delwyn that we could start editing soon. Unfortunately, he replied saying he was sick.

But here's where lesson four emerged: You can find a million reasons not to do something, but it takes only one good reason if you really want to do it. Despite being ill, Delwyn hadn't abandoned me. As I wrapped up the final few scans, phones across the animation lab started buzzing simultaneously. One by one, people approached asking if I needed help.

Delwyn had messaged everyone he thought capable of assisting me. With this impromptu animation army, there was no way this promo wouldn't be screened. We finished just two hours before the deadline.

My friends, who had no idea about this last-minute resurrection, were under the impression my promo wouldn't be screened. I'd kept quiet, figuring it would make a better surprise. Those two minutes of screening followed by the crowd's applause remain one of the best moments of my life. Even now, when inspiration or motivation wanes, I revisit those few moments to get back on track.

That's when I truly joined the clan of NIDian fools who understand what it takes to create something, and learned the most important lesson of all: Only a creator understands that any creation is way bigger than its creators or anything that any one of its creators can imagine.

The Impromptu Flip Books

Not all animation requires 600 drawings and a team of saviors, though. While waiting for a friend's call about his exam schedule, I found a notepad from INS Betwa (an Indian Navy ship) and aimlessly started creating a flip book.

From nothing emerged a woman, and then—to avoid obscenity—I made smoke flow out from her blouse. It took around 20 minutes, a stark contrast to the festival promo marathon. This little experiment taught me that animation doesn't always need massive production—sometimes it's just about capturing movement in its simplest form.

The Lunch Box Laboratory

My early animation days were filled with these small experiments—lunch box flip book tests featuring everything from a hairy guy climbing stairs to various walk cycles, horse animations, throwing motions, animal cycles inspired by The Animator's Survival Kit, an aquarium sequence, a samurai fight, underwater swimming characters, and miscellaneous looping animations.

These quick sketches became my animation laboratory. Without the pressure of deadlines or audiences, I could explore movement, timing, and expression in their purest forms. Each flip book was a low-stakes experiment that collectively built my understanding of how things move—and how I could capture that movement.

The Beginning of a Vocation

Looking back at these early animation experiments—from the high-stakes festival promo to the casual flip books—I see the foundation of what would become not just a skill but a vocation. Animation taught me persistence, problem-solving, and the magic of bringing still images to life.

What started as an enthusiasm-fueled college project became a way of seeing the world—noticing how things move, how emotions translate to expressions, how time and space can be manipulated frame by frame. Each drawing, each scan, each late-night editing session shaped not just animations but the animator I was becoming.

So here's to my first chapter in animation—blue-tinted, sleep-deprived, and wildly ambitious. The perfect beginning to a journey that continues to unfold one frame at a time.

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In the next chapter, I'll explore how these early experiments led to more structured animation work and the evolution of my personal style. Until then, keep your pencils sharp and your scanners functional.