KOCHI: The story of how Kodumon Potty reached the mana was the fulcrum in the Bramayugam plot that would turn it from a hushed horror mystery to an enigmatic thriller. As director Rahul Sadasivan approached the Eunoians, all he wanted was this two-minute sequence to fit in perfectly with the fabric of the movie set in a spooky milieu and framed in black and white.
The Eunoians Studio had by then embarked on several projects that set them apart as a team of creative workers. Its beginning was some 10 years ago, as a group of sprightly six freelancers who had coached themselves in the art of animation and related topics.
Their team was now 25 strong, with artists, scriptwriters, motion graphic designers, compositors, storyboard artists, character designers, background artists, illustrators, designers, animators motion graphic artists and editors.
The Bramayugam project was a challenge to them. Mainly because the model was not popular in this part of the country and the parallels would mostly be drawn with Hollywood productions such as Kill Bill, film festival listings such as Drapchi, and flicks from the Orient where the use of animation in the narrative had long made a catchy effect.
Eunoians soon got down to work after deliberations. Proving their mettle to the movie team was a sample of scribbled drawings to depict the goddess Varahi with a senior priest.
After approval, came the static frame. The creative director, Balaram J, led the development of the storyboard and animatics, with direction from Seerow Unni and creative director Rajesh Velachery. Additionally, concept art was contributed by Seerow Unni and Rajesh Velachery, while Jeroy Joseph and Mithun Krishna were instrumental in creating the demo animation. Soon, the sample 10-second snippet was ready for the nod.
“We were elated and enthused at the enormity of the project. The rest of the video was done to depict a painting. We worked hard for a month and finished the sequence before the movie went for censoring,” says Azeem Kattali, Managing Director of Eunoians.
The finished product showed the Eunoians’ frames merging effortlessly with the rest of the film. The work fetched them applause and even calls for more such work from Tamil and Telugu film industries.
“It is a huge success for a small team like us,” Seerow says, remembering their early days of partnership for a government organisation’s project. “It was an offer to make e-learning animation videos for CDIT.”
Probably this was also the time when Indian animation dreams were taking shape. The state already had seen animation’s presence in videos for children and gaming. “Giving life to art has always caught human fancy. Of all fine arts, animation did it in the most convincing, creative, and markedly, innocent way. We, too, wanted to walk this path,” said Eunoians when asked about their decision to start the venture.
After the CDIT venture, Eunoians graduated to make small animated explainer videos. “Those were the days when the start-up ecosystem was taking off. Wannabe entrepreneurs needed explainer videos to get their ideas across to the investors. And what better medium than animations? We took the hint and made videos for start-ups dabbling in Fintech, Healthtech and Edutech,” says Azeem.
With rave reviews for their explainer videos, Eunoians then launched themselves into the world of awareness videos for NGOs and even for world bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Among the prominent works handled by them included videos made during the Covid pandemic for the WHO. It was for the South Asian region to showcase various hygiene habits to be followed during the pandemic. For the WWF, the theme was man-animal conflict.
Eunoians’ next project is what set them apart in the sector. They were to be part of Kerala Tourism’s makeover project, ‘The Crossover Stories’. The idea was to focus on the positives of the state’s cross-cultural interactions.
The short videos showed the different time frames from Kerala’s history. Whether the story of Herman Gundert’s Kerala jaunt or the compilation of the legendary medicinal tome ‘Hortus Malabaricus’ aided by the Dutch collaboration with regional Ayurvedic physicians such as Itti Achuthan and others, viewers were taken to yesteryear’s Kerala through frames that merged information and creative finesse. All these, with ample portions of what marks animation as unique — the innocence of the naïve pencil drawings.
“’The Crossover Stories’ is an ongoing project,” says Azeem. He points out that the company shot to international attention after FIFA featured a video on Eunoians who had created a wall art inside Kaloor Jawahar Lal Nehru International Stadium.
“We have now organically transformed into working for films and ads. The signature film we did for the Mammootty Kampany was taken note of. Parava films, which made Manjummel Boys, wanted their signature film to reflect its motto — to help fledglings find their wings. So we showed it as the flight of pigeons. Also, for Blessy’s production house, Visual Romance, it was the magical dance between couples showing the essence of love,” Azeem says. The sequence plays just before Blessy’s latest Aadujeevitham begins, matching frames to A R Rahman’s tunes. The next project in the signature genre with Eunoians is for Anoop Kannan Stories.
The versatile team’s advertisement projects are also plenty. “We ensure the content of these films could go viral. Some of the works we did are for Medimix, Malabar Gold, etc.,” says Imodraj Mohanamani, art director of Eunoians
Eunoians is now foraying into the future that is to be shaped, according to the team, by several realities — Augmented, Virtual, Extended and Mixed. “But our own reality will be ‘This and that; next and the rest’ which we call our motto,” says the team.