Watch: Jamia Students Use Sand Art to Make Haunting Animated Short on Kashmir
“Every street here is covered in blood now. It does not snow here anymore.”
“Every street here is covered in blood now. It does not snow here anymore.”
A group of first year students from Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) University’s AJK Mass Communication Research Centre have made a haunting five-and-a-half-minutes video about Kashmir, proving once again that art is one of the most crucial and poignant weapons of dissent.
Twenty three students from JMI’s MA Visual Effects and Animation course (2017-19), got together to create a sand animation music video titled 'Zaroorat Nahi' that depicts the plight of Kashmiri civilians living under the pall of state tyranny and military repression.
“The students painstakingly created the video using sand as their medium.” Course Director Dr Atul Sinha told News18.
“They animated over 7500 frames of sand art to film the video. It took them nearly four weeks just to shoot every frame," Sinha said, adding that the animated video was part of the students' coursework, even though the topic for the video was chosen by the students themselves.
"Instead of just focusing on sand art animation techniques to make a swanky video, we focused on telling a story. Since the visual medium is a powerful one, we decided to explore it to tell serious stories that need telling," Ubair Showkat, one of the three Kashmiri students involved in the making of the video said.
"A lot of the music video is in Kashmiri. But when we played it for students at AJK, no one needed subtitles to understand or comprehend the images. Powerful images have a language of their own and wanted to use it to talk about the deplorable condition in Kashmir. The idea was not to point fingers but to bring forth the reality in front of more eyes," said Ubair.
The video plays as the backdrop of a song, penned by Ahmad Zareef who wrote the Kashmiri lyrics and Manan Khan who wrote the Hindi lyrics. The music was co-composed by Hujjat Khumani and Manan Khan.
The stirring video has been nominated for the prestigious FICCI Best Animated Frames (BAF) Awards under the ‘Best Student Animated Short Film’ category.
Watch it here.
Twenty three students from JMI’s MA Visual Effects and Animation course (2017-19), got together to create a sand animation music video titled 'Zaroorat Nahi' that depicts the plight of Kashmiri civilians living under the pall of state tyranny and military repression.
“The students painstakingly created the video using sand as their medium.” Course Director Dr Atul Sinha told News18.
“They animated over 7500 frames of sand art to film the video. It took them nearly four weeks just to shoot every frame," Sinha said, adding that the animated video was part of the students' coursework, even though the topic for the video was chosen by the students themselves.
"Instead of just focusing on sand art animation techniques to make a swanky video, we focused on telling a story. Since the visual medium is a powerful one, we decided to explore it to tell serious stories that need telling," Ubair Showkat, one of the three Kashmiri students involved in the making of the video said.
"A lot of the music video is in Kashmiri. But when we played it for students at AJK, no one needed subtitles to understand or comprehend the images. Powerful images have a language of their own and wanted to use it to talk about the deplorable condition in Kashmir. The idea was not to point fingers but to bring forth the reality in front of more eyes," said Ubair.
The video plays as the backdrop of a song, penned by Ahmad Zareef who wrote the Kashmiri lyrics and Manan Khan who wrote the Hindi lyrics. The music was co-composed by Hujjat Khumani and Manan Khan.
The stirring video has been nominated for the prestigious FICCI Best Animated Frames (BAF) Awards under the ‘Best Student Animated Short Film’ category.
Watch it here.