"375 Spectators - 180 Minutes - 1 Stage and energy unleashed"

12th of July, 2008, Saturday, Kolkata: ...And he came running down the gallery steps of the auditorium to take the centre-stage only to mass hypnotize his audience “gen-Y” for the next 180 minutes.

The incident - Around 350 Arena Park Street students and 25 of their teachers were held captive in Gyan Manch Auditorium this morning for three hours by a gentleman. He did not possess any ammunition except for a microphone. The anticlimax – the captives expressed a sincere desire to hold back their captor after the three hours of captivity.

The event – The second seminar of HAT-Tricks. The captor – Mr. Prosenjit Ganguly.

The animation students of Arena Animation - Park Street, were not prepared for what was in store for them when they trooped into Gyan Manch to hear Mr. Prosenjit Ganguly speak about “The actors behind the action”. There were many disbelievers in them and many had contingency plans that if the seminar was boring they would head to the nearest multiplex for a decent movie.

As is become of Kolkata and reminiscent of the first IPL match of night Riders at the Eden, power failed when PJ started to speak. There were no presentations, no pens, no paper, no audio visuals with him but PJ continued enthralling the audience with his powerhouse “performance”, and not a single soul moved in the packed auditorium. He was a treat to listen to and to watch as he spoke, mimicked, acted, joked and pranced about the stage, making it his own in his signature style.

He introduced the students to the meaning, the process and the stages of animation development. He explained to them the importance of story, research, concept and the visualisation that goes behind making an animation film. He talked about why a rigger or a texture artist or even an animator needs to understand the story to enable them to do justice to the visualisation of the film maker. He explained that these components were the “actors” behind the “action” or the film.

PJ illustrated to his audience how passion as an ingredient can act as a catalyst in the process that translates ones thougts and ideas into the output of animation.
He implored them to cultivate a habit of continuous practice. Through his mimicry and caricature, he showed them importance of acting sense for creating any animation because sans the knowledge of moods and emotions, one can’t portray that feeling into any character. PJ’s dedication was being reflected through his body language and his assets (his “Desktop” and “Laptop” i.e. a couple of sketch books which he always carries).
The also drew examples from his life and his NID days, making the audience identify the profound values of the design process with utmost simplicity. His talk ranged from the simple differentiation between a story (to be read) and a screenplay (to be performed); from the primary lesson of the vitality of remaining a student for life, to the significant aspects of design-visualization and pre-production like ideation, story-telling, story-boarding and character design (The Actors) before taking the actual plunge of getting a film into the production stage (The Action).

Anecdotes from his student-life at NID brought alive a whole new perspective to the total process of learning and teaching animation. And it did raise a few questions in the teachers’ minds: are we being able to create that environment for our students where they can enjoy their education? Even if the answer to this be in the negative, the light at the end of the tunnel was visible too.

And even as he accepted a small token of appreciation from the spellbound audience, it was a unanimous feeling that it was actually he, who had left them the magnanimous gift of a new dream, a new passion, a new love and a new vision-that of transforming oneself from just a student or a teacher of animation to a film maker. At the end of the day, the audience walked out with the same camera they had walked in with - but with different eyes.

Ninety percent of the audience had come to hear a three-hour long lecture from the man whose abovementioned profile suggests but five percent of his persona. The tricks that PJ held up his sleeves, ensured that a hundred percent of the audience went back home, if not with an amazing growth in their knowledge base, then at least with hearts ignited with a passion for animation. The audience laughed with him, responded to him and felt united with him as he took them through an enriching experience of falling in love with the entire process of animation film-making. They had just been re-introduced to the phenomenon called “animation” by PJ.

After the seminar, the Director of Arena Animation, Park Street Mr. Ramesh Ruia invited Mr. Ganguly to speak to the faculties of Arena Park Street in order to help them carry forward the process of Holistic Animation Training introduced by them and Mr. Ganguly did just that by advising the faculties on how to deliver their training for maximum impact.

“PJ’s suggestions and guidelines will be adopted and synced to our current training methodology and we hope to deliver true animators of the type required by the industry as soon as the students who have undergone training under this methodology start to graduate” said Mr. Ruia. He went on to wish that more PJ’s from the animation industry would come forward in this fashion to guide and help Arena Park Street in taking this process forward.