Madrasi

We live in a world rotating on labels and discrimination. As the planet rotates, we rotate with it. We wrap ourselves in labels, embody tags, wear them like a second skin, and sometimes bear these tags upon us like weapons. We end up hurting people, end up calling them things they’re not. We become slaves to these labels. But we have a choice. We can choose not to, choose to be free of these labels and their discrimination. Labels that have now begun to follow us like a shadow in the dark, a shadow that stays invisible to the eye until the morning. A notion that disillusions us to believe that it doesn't exist, but it very much does. It's time to draw the curtains and let the light in. It’s time to stop discriminating and open our eyes to everything that we can be.

“Madrasi” is a personal tribute to the people living in the south of India, to every South Indian who’s been discriminated for various reasons like their skin color in a brown dominant country, or their literary levels, or even their food! Madrasi is for everyone who ever felt shoved in a box and was labelled to be someone who they were not.
Co-written and narrated by South Indian artists, Madrasi focuses on bringing the narrative of the discriminated while still highlighting the uniqueness of their culture and heritage.

The Process

From the micro to the macro, human begins are different than one another, no one is the same. We’re different, yet the same. Similarly South Indians are a people with similar traditions and origins, but they’re different even among themselves. To emphasize on the difference within a people, we adopted different character designs, animation styles, software and mediums. We worked with 2D, and 3D both, trying to capture all angles of the experience of being in the South. For experiences with high emotions that flow into you, we animated traditionally in Adobe Animate CC. For experiences like travelling and food we tried capturing the essence of the South in a way to present to tourists- using Cinema 4D.

Shots involving high emotions, or those representing the narrator were animated imagining a flow, either calm or a torrent depending on her mood. These we done in Adobe Animate CC in 25 frames per second, and were later layered with minute animation in After Effects.