My project involved designing an animated TV series for children based on the Indian railways as a broad theme. The brief given to me said the show had to have a retro flavour (like Malgudi Days) and yet be contemporary in its context. My ultimate deliverable would be a short pilot-episode that could work as a pitch for a client in the future.

I researched on the various kinds of animated shows that currently run on the popular Indian TV channels, studied the different plot-lines, characters, styling etc, conducted surveys with kids of various age groups to try and understand their likes/dislikes/ interests/fascination in order to understand which age-group could be targeted with a theme such as this. Accordingly, I came up with ideas for the structure of the series, possible stories, characters and the look and feel of the show.

Since I was the only person from an Animation film design background at Axiom, I was given considerable freedom to go about the processes the way I liked. However, this also led to the problem of having to take all kinds of decisions by myself with no one to consult most of the time (especially regarding technical matters).

Currently, most channels run European/American/Japanese shows dubbed in Hindi. There is practically no original Indian content in animation. A couple of shows still bank upon aged mythological content and nothing contemporary or Indian. These films could fill that gap.