Dinner At Eight
Student film made in collaboration with Taarini Ravjit
Dinner at Eight was loosely inspired by Haruki Murakami’s short story, The Year of Spaghetti. 2016 was a rough year for my mental health, spent largely in isolation. I spent December of 2016 at home with my parents and Eb, and made myself a Tomato Mozzarella Basil Sandwich every morning, which I ate in the front yard with Eb. I did nothing much that December, just trying to heal my heart. It was also when Taarini and I first started collaborating.
Both Taar and I love Murakami, and I shared this short story with her, which resonated with her too. We decided to make this story a starting point for our collaborative student film. We were both in third year of college, excited about stop motion, Sculpey and Spaghetti. Dinner at Eight was a celebration of loving your own company. It follows the main character, who we named Bob, as he gets ready for Dinner at Eight.
On a technical level, both Taarini and I have grown a lot as animators. Taar went on to design a beautiful stop motion film for her Thesis, where she made none of the mistakes we made when we fabricated Bob. When I rewatch it now, it is difficult to seperate myself from all the mistakes and shortcomings. But Dinner at Eight is super special to me because it truly changed my life, and marked a movement in my storytelling towards stories that nourished me to work on.
(Special thanks to Daksha for painting us this BEAUTIFUL poster.)
We had yoga mats in the QAR room for naps, and a cupboard stocked with milk tetra packs, cereal and snacks. (Spot the small jar of nutella). We hid from the world, and were frequently visited by our friends who came for company, air conditioning, snacks and for the much needed help with set building and puppet fabrication.
We tried using replaceable mouths for our puppet, all sculpted using sculpey. We were advised to fill out Bob’s face, but looking back, Taar and I loved the older Bob. This is also not how we are taught puppet fabrication in college (our stopmotion course teaches us using plasticine in a very jugaad way), so it was a lot of trial and error and figuring things out for us. At one point, we almost replaced Bob’s head with a pink Fluff ball. Penli and Daksha helped us stitch Bob’s beautiful clothes. We did not know puppets break during the course of shoot, and spent a lot of time crying and performing surgery on Bob.
The set was fabricated using mostly found material. All the fabric was textile waste from a tailor shop nearby, or the textile studio.
Project Information
Producted by: National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad
Direction and Animation: Deepti Megh, Taarini Ravjit
Puppet Fabrication: Deepti Megh, Taarini Ravjit, Daksha Salam, Penli Jamir
Set Design: Deepti Megh, Taarini Ravjit
Sound Design: Deepti, with help from Sridhar Sudhir
Dedicated to Neppydoo