Saumya
Oberoi

Translated to mean 'A recipe for a good mood', this project was completed during a 6 month exchange program in the Spring semester of 2023, at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. The project arose from a desire to explore tangible animation toys, with a vision of being able to ultimately assemble them into a 'short film in a box'. The project ultimately resulted in two prototypical outputs: one, being a scaled-down version of my physical 'cinema in a box' concept, and the other being a sequential series of narrative animations that fit within the constraints of animation toys: small frame counts, large-scale movements, and (barring one shot) semantically sensible loops.

The content was designed to be as appealing as possible, especially for children. Desiring a clear beginning, middle and end, I first referenced stories such as the Panchatantra tales and Aesop's fables before coming to a simple, familiar place for me: the kitchen! Explore the interactive story through the Figma prototype embedded below, and scroll further down for the process.

The story of the siblings began as a very quick character exploration and simple storyboard. However, it wasn't long before the characters transformed into foxes — for the universal appeal of small animals doing human things, à la Beatrix Potter.

From these, emerged a cleaned-up storyboard; this exercise would have, of course, been incomplete without making sure I was using proper reference — so I finetuned my own recipe and made my own batch of cookies to make sure I was getting everything just right ;) This storyboard was made at a time when I still intented to create a physical object which would dispense a real cookie at the end of the 'short film'. As I would realize in the process of creating the physical prototype, this was too ambitious for the timeframe and given my own woodworking skills.

However, still wanting to commit to the idea of the physical format, I chose to create a setting as I would have for the original concept: placing each scene within a large dollhouse-like setting.

Putting it all together within Figma created the final interactive version embedded at the top of the page. Below are some snippets from my explorations of the physical aspects of the project: creating animation toys, in my quest for 'animation sans film'. The resulting toy, based on hand-crafted wooden gears, allowed me to turn each rotating platform into a different type of toy; one became a zoetrope, while another became a phenakistoscope.