Bhavna Madan

I want to be an animator. I say this still after two tedious months of animating for my grad film. I want to be an animator and I’ve never been more excited about it.

I’d love to start off as a 2D animator and be willing to explore further if the studios are willing to guide me on it. This term has gotten me better acquainted with After Effects and that’s one more thing I’d like to explore some more.

I’ve been keeping up with the online animation job sheet and I joined the Asians for Animation community a month ago where I continue to look for positions and keep up with industry events. I’ve had a website for a couple of years now, but last month, I completely revamped it. Now its more of an animation portfolio and less of an illustration one.

Within London, I’ve been interested in studios like Art&Graft, Blinkink, Nexus, StudioAKA, etc. and hope to work on a 2D project with them. I’d also like to explore being a freelance animator at some point, considering I’ve had almost 6 years of experience being a freelance illustrator. I know I have the drive to work remotely.

In the past month or so I’ve only had time to apply for two positions – one with the BT group as an in house animator to which I got a rejection letter, and the second was for the summer internship at Art&Graft – which I got to give an interview for. I will be continuing to apply for positions in the coming few weeks.

Recently, I redid my website entirely to present myself more as an animator. I curated what goes on my site a little better and it’s more precise now.

First, the showreel:

After my unit 2 film The Original Human and my unit 3 film If I Raised My Mother, I had a much wider platter of work to chose from, so I got to be more picky. I knew I wanted a song that was catchy and memorable. Maybe from the 80s. I was aiming for an instrumental cover of Smalltown Boy and went with Hey You by the Cure instead because of the fast pace and continuous beats, but mostly – the opening with the drums.

I started the showreel with a piece of personal art that I worked on in 2020 so it synced up with the drums and jumped to all my best pieces of work immediately after. There are quite a few turnaround shots in the first half, but I did that intentionally to showcase by understanding of a 3D object even when animating in 2D. I also have character interactions in the first half.

Next, categorising my projects:

My strong suit is character art, and it only makes sense to put that first. Inside my character art gallery, I have designs I’ve done for my films, pitches and class. I have character designs I made as fanart and later got licensed by the publishing house for a promotional event for a short period. I also have a character sheet I did for my Dungeons & Dragons character.

Next, backgrounds. Over the years, through freelance experience and self initiated drive, I’ve worked on a few notable backgrounds that I think speak for my skills. Besides being a character focused animator/artist, I’m also completely open to be a background artist for animation.

Then my published work. Even though these are some of my greatest achievements, I think its only right to place character art and backgrounds before this to showcase my skills. This section however, is purely just to demonstrate that I’ve had experience working with clients and strict schedules before. In this page are some book covers I’ve illustrated and other cool projects I’ve gotten to be a part of.

Following these categories are two pages. One for my term 3 film The Original Human and the other for my undergrad film Star-Borne. The website ends with a bio and a contact form. These parts of the website can also be accessed at the top of my website.

More about my social media portfolio in the blog entry about self-promotion.

As someone who has worked with clients mostly because of the reach I’ve had through social media, I understand the power it holds and how important it is to curate to an audience.

I’ve built a platform on most websites under the username @kidovna and I’ve done that drawing for things I love and engage. This is where I met most of the authors I’ve worked with and made connections.

_{pictured above: my instagram and tumblr}

As my graduation comes close and I finish up my grad film, I realised it would be a good idea to make an account to promote the film share some behind the scenes action.

Promotional content for the film will include progress shots, character art and posters. An example would be:

Apart from social media promotion, I’ve also been to two Festivus events organised in the past year and gotten to introduce myself to many animators. After the submissions I plan on researching festivals and sending out my film to as many festivals as I can. And hopefully make more connections wherever it gets accepted.

I’ve had conversations with industrial professionals about my film and would love to be able to continue to do so.

This is a brief documentation for the process of the Reflection on Reality project.

Earlier in May this year, we got to pitch a keyword to the MA Writing students from Central Saint Martins and the word I pitched was “Divine”. The writer Xiaoyao Zhang was paired with me next and this was the script I was provided after:

After the approval of the script, the voiceover was recorded by MA Writing student Felix Berendse:

In October, the pre-production part of the animation began. While I felt like I’d hit a few obstacles trying to interpret the script in my own way, eventually, I came to a point where I could see myself taking the concept further. At this point, my film was going to be called The Parasite. And this was the first pitch I’d put together:

The animatic came soon after and this is where I got to first put down my ideas of how I wanted the story to progress

With feedback and guidance, eventually, the film started to take shape and the title of the film had shifter from The Parasite to The Original Human. At this point we were given the opportunity to pitch an idea for a soundtrack to the student of Guildhall School of Music and Drama and this was the pitch I’d prepared hoping that someone would understand where I was going with this:

Before proceeding with the production of the film, I’d put together a little personal schedule so I could finish all the work on time:

Moving into production, the next step was the Rough Animation:

A this point I had a more solid understanding of exactly where my film was going and I’d also received a music sample by Sam Moss that I connected with almost immediately. Things were looking up. The next few weeks were spent cleaning up the film and getting through the shots one by one.

Here is a sample of a shot breakdown (of the title card)

The final film with the music was completed on Final Cut Pro. The softwares used for the animation were TVPaint, Procreate, and Procreate dreams.

These are some more stills from the final film:

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Lastly, another role in animation that I’d like to work in is as an editor. While the artists, animators, voice acting and sound teams work hard to tell the stories in shots and sequences, there’s something very fulfilling in putting everything together and guiding the narrative to form the bigger picture. Whereas writing for animation is more vast and limitless, editing for animation is a far more precise task than it would be for live action as there arent usually multiple takes of the same shot.

Working as an editor for an animation project is a busy task from the get-go. The editor guides the pre-production and production teams so as to not waste any footage or labour and to make sure that the story is going the right way. Almost like a producer. They get to oversee the music and sound as well. As someone with fairly adequate experience working with sound and enjoying the process, the combination of working with both animation and sound is something I’m very much drawn to.

As summarised by editor Edie Ichioka, “In animation, the editor is creating and recreating a blueprint to align with the director’s vision. It starts with storyboards and scratch dialogue, and moves on to previsualization, layout, final dialogue, animation, music, lighting, composite shots, score, and the final mix and grading. Each step informs the next and often loops back for revision.”

While being an artist and animator is something I love to do, being a storyteller is also something I enjoy just as much if not more, for the reason I got into animation was so I could tell my stories using this medium. Being an editor would give me many chances to guide the storytelling process.

All this being said, if I were to go with my heart and tell what I wanted to be fifteen years from now, I would say “Art Director” with no hesitation at all, but I think the animation industry has a lot to offer me before I can establish myself as one. And I’m looking forward to it!

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As we move on to the production roles of animation, we start to enter waters that have always had me on guard. Especially when it comes to being a clean-up artist. I think the amount of skill and passion it takes to be a 2D clean-up artist is quite incredible and from all the experience I’ve heard about from professionals in the industry who have taken the time to visit Central Saint Martins to talk to us about the clean-up process, it seems that I would be right with the assumption.

It takes a lot of discipline to ground oneself and draw characters designed and animated by other people and contribute such a significant part to the finished look of the animation. I’d never before this term gotten the opportunity to clean up anything properly. Just one animation I did in my undergrad but back then I wasn’t really aware of how to do it precisely. This November I cleaned up my animated short for the Reflections of Reality project and I got better acquainted with inbetweening.

Like writing for animation, but on a much bigger and more precise scale, the creative mind and understanding of 3D form are essential to the role of a clean-up artist. Now that the roles of a breakdown artist, an inbetweener, and a clean-up artist almost entirely fall upon the clean-up artist, knowledge of the structure and timing of animation are just as important as the structure and timing of oneself with their craft.

One animated film I’ve really looked up to with the clean-up, colouring, and lighting process is Klaus (2019). The various behind the scene shots we have gotten from the animators right from the character design to the process of lighting up the film have been very interesting to explore and almost five years later, I still continue to find things about the clean-up process in that movie that makes me want to explore the field more. Here’s an example of a shot breakdown from Klaus.

Working on my film this month made me realise that with a little more time and a little more guidance, clean-up is something I would really enjoy exploring in the future. Also this quote from clean-up artist Todd Jacobsen,¹

“The little fire inside me that I felt while I was working on the film gets stoked once again, and it makes me walk a little taller knowing that I was an element of a moment in time that can’t be explained so easily.”

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Earlier in March this year, I’d written a blog entry¹ about my journey as an animator till then because I’d misunderstood an assignment. However, looking back at it now in November with the experience I’ve gained since then is pretty interesting.

Since March, I have worked on two full-fledged animation projects. The London International Animation Festival Sting and the Term 3 short film in collaboration with the Writing students. During this time, I’ve come to realise that I’m not scared to be an animator. I’ve been scared of the lack of resources and guidance. I’ve been enjoying working on all different parts of the animation process from the pre-production to the production to post-production. Though I still heavily lean towards pre-production and visual development, I’d like to explore three different roles within the industry that I’d like to try out in the future. Starting with being a writer.

Being a writer for animation I think requires a certain level of creativity and understanding of the medium. While I’ve daddled a little in it over the years, I wanted to understand what exactly it would be like professionally. I’ve only ever had to guide myself with the instructions on a script, but what does it take to guide a team? To get a group of creatives to be on the same page as you with no visuals to provide. In an interview with Lisa Granshaw, writer Jennifer Muro says, “Thinking visually, I think is a huge thing in animation. It’s so funny, writing live-action samples and stuff like that now, I think very visually when it comes to how I write my lines because you could do so much more sometimes that you couldn’t possibly do before in live-action, because it would be so expensive”.²

This stood out to me because the second point is one of the main reasons why I enjoy animation as a medium this much. Animation allows me to be as creative as I want to be without having to be wary of the limitations. Writing for animation feels almost like an empty playground with an unlimited stack of legos and absolutely no laws of physics to stop me from building whatever I want to. One example of writing for animation that has stayed with me since the first time I read it was the script for the leap of faith scene from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.³ It goes as such:

“Miles isn’t falling through the frame. He’s RISING” is something I think about every time I watch the film and someday I’d like to be given the chance to write something like this. Something that makes a difference to the animation even when the viewer doesn’t know it.

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I’ve wanted to be an animator since I was 15. I’ve been an artist for way longer, but the first time I watched Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon, I knew I wanted to use animation as a medium to bring my art to life. I wanted to tell my stories using this new skill I was going to learn.

So I sat down with trial versions of multiple software to practice animating. I rotoscoped, and traced, and did everything I could as a fifteen-year-old with little to no exposure to the industry until I could build a portfolio enough to get me into a college course that would teach me animation. And that was exactly what I got to do in 2016 when I started my bachelor’s in Animation. I worked hard for four years. Maybe too hard towards the end because I was burnt out. This medium that I was so passionate about no longer felt comfortable. It felt daunting and scary. I felt stuck because there was a part of me four years of hard work later, that believed I still wasn’t equipped enough to work in this field professionally. This was around the time Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse had come out and I was so backed up into a corner by my own fears, it felt like it was that or nothing for me (silly), So I took a break from it.

I specialised as an illustrator instead and rekindled my love for art through that. I spent my time during the pandemic establishing myself as an illustrator and character designer. I animated something for myself once a year so I never forgot what it actually meant to me. And then I decided I was going to take a chance with being an animator once again and chose to do my masters in the same field. And I moved countries to do this.

Even though I’ve done a few of the exercises in this blog before, redoing them over the past few months in this course when I’m a little more confident in my art and talking to people who are equally passionate about this medium has brought me newfound joy. Learning the basics of 3D animation, experimenting with different software, trialing stop motion animation again – It’s all been a breath of fresh air after two years of hiding from it.

I’m only two terms into this course and we’ve mostly been working with the basics, but I’m already less scared of concepts like clean-up animation and perspective now. I’m still learning to enjoy the process and learning my limits so I don’t end up burnt out again, but so far my reflections here have been positive. I’m hoping that I continue to work and interact with the medium in ways that keeps my love for it alive because all these years later, I would still love to tell the world stories of my own using animation.

   I was assigned to work with the 2^nd year MA Character Animation student Bingqi Liu. Bingqi has been working on her final project about the everyday fears of a mother who has just sent her child off to school. Initially, Bingqi had sent me an email saying my work with her would be to collect references and I was willing to do that. However, in her second email, she gave me the option to pick between collecting references or character development. As I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog, character development and the creative pre-production process of animation are my favourite things to work on so I asked Bingqi if it would be okay for me to play around with the characters. It also helped that the initial mockup I was sent immediately appealed to me. Bingqi immediately agreed to give me reign in this department.

   I started out with silhouette mockups of the mother and child first. I sent in the files and got a reply with the silhouettes that best fit the story.

This is when my other assignments started clashing with this and the time I had to put into all of them. I was a little unsure of where to proceed from that point. I believe Bingqi was working on the references part of the project at the same time. I was reached out to again a few days later asking if I would be able to provide drawn-out character references for poses in the animatic. And that even if it wasn’t the final design it didn’t matter because these references would be far more important to have at hand.

   I took up the challenge and got to work immediately. Bingqi’s style is very expressive and works wonders in animation. My style has always been a little bit more restrictive and subdued and I’ve always wanted to expand and reach out of my comfort zone a little, so this assignment also helped me broaden my horizons. First I started with the child going through almost every single pose and expression on the animatic. This was the outcome:

Next, I started working on the mother. This one was a little more exciting as a few of the shots with the mother were close-ups to focus on her reactions. I got to pay more attention to her expressions this way. This was the outcome:

   When I handed in the sketches, Bingqi seemed ecstatic about the outcomes. She said this was perfect for what she was going for. That I’d gotten most of them down and that she could proceed from there. She asked me to focus on my assignments from that point as I’d finished the tasks she asked me to and told me to reach out again later if I had some time to spare. Unfortunately, my work has been extended till the night before submission and I haven’t been able to reach out for more work. Maybe in the coming weeks, I could check in with her and ask if she needs my help with something small.

   Overall, I had a wonderful time working on this and I’m very much looking forward to seeing her final film someday. The creative vision behind it is so wholesome and relatable and I’ve always been a sucker for narratives revolving around a mother and child so I’m honoured I got paired up with Bingqi to work on this project.