KOCHI: Kapil Gopinathan has always had an eye for the exceptional among the ordinary. Since he was a kid, the artist has been transforming mundane into wonderous with his active imagination. A matchbox becomes a television, nozzle of a hand sanitiser turns into a bicycle seat and what not!. “More than an artist I want to call myself a craftsman,” says Kapil, who is also a painter, musician and filmmaker.
His room at his home in Thiruvananthapuram is a miniature world filled with creative experiments. When he was a kid, he used to blacken blank sheets of paper with the soot from kerosene lamps. “You just have to hold the paper close to the flame and it will turn dark. On it, I would draw houses, trees, trains, the moon — all things children are fascinated with. I loved the process of creating white images on black paper. I have used it in one of my animations called Nightmare on Rails,” he says. Now, the artist can create a whole railway station out of scrap like cardboard, spines of coconut leaves (eerkil), and areca nut flesh.
The railway station was for a short film I was planning called The Cure. It is a coming of age story about a young man with an inferiority complex. It is depicted in the movie as a big white mole on his face that grows back every time he gets rid of it. The character ends up going on a long journey,” says Kapil. To recreate the railway station near Ooty where a steam engine still runs, Kapil went all the way and for research. “I drew the steam engine and studied each part of it. Drawing is the first step to creating a near-perfect model,” he adds. “I have created short animations with some of these props,” he says. “When you make stop motion animation clips, each second takes 24 frames to come together. So, you need to draw those frames or move the props and take the pictures according to the storyline. Each detail has to be aligned to tell a story,” he says.
When Kapil sees anything at all, he immediately wonders how it would look if made into a miniature. In between, the artist pursued hotel management too and worked as a chef in a restaurant in Mumbai. “I was young and wanted a job back then. I wanted to be a chef after watching the Dulquer Salmaan-starrer Ustad Hotel. Now, I have a miniature of it too,” he quips.
Later, he joined the National Design Institute in Ahmedabad, and that is how he fell back into his passion. Now, working as a designer at an IT company, he also creates short animations for NFT platforms and is working on a movie. “I am working on the background scores of the crowdfunded movie,” he says.
Instagram: @blind_artist_n
Animating stories
As a stop motion animation lover, Kapil has ceated a bunch of clips as NFT and short films. For every one minute scene, he creates more than thousand drawings or frames.