What is the film about?

In the hush of a cold winter, at some distant country far from home… Maya, chances upon a long forgotten photo diary and it takes her on a journey through time back to her family home in a roller coaster ride of memories.

What influenced it?

Hand drawn animated films.

A little background information...

Director, Deepayan Purkait, says:

I like to think of ‘In Her Time’, as a work of Art, and this work of ours explores alienation, separation, longing, memories, and mental health. In today’s world where so many people are moving away to other countries far far away from their homes looking for opportunity and work and a better living, I wanted to create and tell this story about such a person who left home and moved to a different country and about the people who stayed behind.

When we talk about this work we like to call it an ‘animated musical’ because we feel this describes our work decently, as it is neither just a music video not is it just an animated short film. It is an animated short story harmonizing with an original musical composition and vice versa, where they each compliment the other while at the same time they are each to their own with their individual autonomy. We wished to create a work where both the film and the music will be like a harmonic extension to the other, as the music composer and producer Soumyarya Mallick would put it:

“uniquely powerful works emerge when one art form becomes a harmonic extension of another”. In this project, this harmony is achieved through careful structural design. The visual language is crafted to possess its own internal rhythm and flow and at the same time, it is shaped to move in harmony with the musical architecture. The result is a dynamic interplay where film becomes a harmonic expansion of the music, and the music, in turn infuses the film with emotional texture. Rather than one medium illustrating the other, they move in dialogue and elevate one another.”

How was the film made?

‘In Her Time’ explores hand drawn animation created using digital medium, just like all the other shorts or animated musicals in the ‘Something To Hold On To’ series.

Everything began from the character design and storyboard stages, where not just the story but the characters and the world they all came into being and were realized. A storyboard is like the blueprint for a film, and once it is completed, even before the film starts to get developed, we can see the entire film in a graphic narrative, and then we create the storyboard animatics and also another cut of the film with the key animation And in both the ‘animatics cut’ and the ‘key animation cut’ the music is also incorporated.

Once all the different shots from the storyboard are animated, cleaned up, developed, and background paintings are created from storyboard sketches and/or background layouts of the world, each shot created once finished were then exported in image sequence and finally brought together into the editor where the film entered the final editing stages with all the finished and exported shots.

‘In Her Time’ is set in not just two different countries but also different time zones; one is the present and another is a distant past that shows us the childhood of ‘Maya’, the lead protagonist, who at present resides in a distant country, where it is cold now, and where she once traveled all alone to live and work.

I sent a chunk of the background layouts and sketches to Devleena Chakraborty, and she developed the background paintings of the cold country, whereas I developed the ones of Maya’s hometown, Kolkata, as shown in Maya’s reminiscence. This was a directorial choice and I think it went well and we have taken the same strategy in the following chapter as well, chapter 3, ‘Something To Hold On To’.

‘In Her Time’ was created over a span of 10 months, perhaps a little more or less, but it took a lot of time.

The story of Maya did not come up all at once, it came into being gradually over time – slowly realized – and the story will continue in the next chapter, ‘Something To Hold On To’, which has completed the storyboard run, and is currently in the key animation process.

To me, it is not just about the story, but also about how the story is told.

And in my very personal opinion, hand-drawn animation is limitless, and timeless, and I seek to create great stylizations, not merely imitate but to transform and transcend reality yet always take from it.