Animation Ch 12: The VFS Experiment

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Where frustration breeds creativity and confinement becomes the perfect subject

The Vancouver Adjustment

Let's talk about adaptation. Vancouver Film School wasn't exactly love at first sight—more like an arranged marriage where you're still figuring out if there's chemistry. The classic immigrant experience: new country, new school, new methods, all while wondering if you've made a catastrophic life decision.

Not that I'm complaining (okay, maybe I am a little). There's something weirdly productive about creative frustration. When you're not completely in love with your environment, you start making things just to prove you belong there—or perhaps to prove you don't.

The 360° Revelation

Some days brought unexpected gifts. Like the day I got my hands on the 360° camera—a brief moment of genuine excitement in the middle of assignment overload.

There's a special kind of torture in discovering something new and fascinating when you're already drowning in deadlines. The mental calculus is brutal: do I explore this cool new tool and fall behind, or stick to the crushing workload and miss out on the fun part?

Learning something new while already overwhelmed is like finding water in the desert when you're carrying too much to begin with—refreshing but ultimately impractical.

Of course, I played with the camera anyway. Some opportunities are worth the late nights that follow.

Lip-Sync and Existential Dread

The lip-sync assignment became strangely therapeutic. Animating to The National's lyrics about being in trouble, seeing double, and staring at screens for too long felt less like an assignment and more like illustrating my own mental state.

There's something deliciously meta about animating exhaustion while experiencing it firsthand. The lyrics perfectly captured that particular flavor of creative burnout that comes from hunching over a computer for unholy amounts of time.

By the time I finished syncing those lyrics about screen fatigue, I was genuinely seeing double myself. Life imitating art imitating life—the animator's version of Inception.

Drop of Fish: The Metaphor I Didn't Plan

My diploma film "Drop of Fish" started as just another project and ended as unintentional autobiography. The story follows a fish who, tired of confinement in his bowl, makes the ambitious leap to freedom—only to find himself in a larger, different kind of confinement.

Looking back, I couldn't have created a more perfect metaphor for my own journey if I'd tried. From India to Canada, from one creative constraint to another—always jumping, always landing in some new version of confinement.

The film itself remains under wraps for now (except for this poster and cryptic barcode), but Fukait (Sanchit Sawaria) delivered a soundtrack that somehow captured exactly what I was trying to say, filling spaces I didn't even know existed in the narrative.

Sometimes you don't realize what your work is really about until it's finished and staring back at you like a mirror.

Maybe I'll compile a making-of someday. The behind-the-scenes journey might actually be more revealing than the film itself.

The Reels: Public Evidence of Private Struggles

Finally, there are the reels—those carefully curated collections that transform months of frustration, failures, and small victories into a cohesive narrative of competence. The 2015 general reel and character animation reel represent not just what I created, but what I survived.

Cai 2015 reel from shashrvaCAI on Vimeo.

Each clip has its own behind-the-scenes story of technical disasters, conceptual rethinking, and late-night rendering sessions. But none of that shows in the final cut—just smooth movements and carefully composed shots that make it all look intentional.

Cai character animation reel 2015 from shashrvaCAI on Vimeo.

That's perhaps the greatest skill I developed at VFS: the ability to transform struggle into something that looks deliberately crafted. To make confinement seem like a creative choice rather than a limitation.

The Vancouver Conclusion

Looking back at these VFS projects—the reluctant assignments, the exciting new tools, the autobiographical fish, the deceptively polished reels—I see more than just animation exercises. I see a chronicle of adaptation, of finding ways to make meaning within constraints that weren't of my choosing.

Vancouver wasn't an instant love affair, but it was a necessary evolution. Sometimes you need to feel slightly out of place to figure out where you belong. Sometimes you need to jump from one bowl to another to realize what you're actually trying to escape.

And sometimes, just sometimes, you need to animate a fish who's tired of confinement to understand your own relationship with freedom.
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