Design Course
The Story of Indian Animation
History and Journey so far
by
Suddhasattwa Basu
Suddhasattwa Basu
Born - 1956 in West Bengal.
He studied fine arts at the Government College of Art & Craft in Kolkatta.
He is the one who made India's first animated television serial – 'Ghayab Aya' which earned national and international acclaim. Basu didn't have any training of animation, what he had were only books and enthusiastic friends. Ghayab was a production for Doordarshan by Studio IFEKT, a sole proprietorship co owned by Ms. Bizeth Banarjee. He did Ghayab with her on profit sharing basis. He came to know her when she was making a tele serial for Doordarshan called 'Police File se' in the year 1985. Then he was working with The Living Media (India Today group) as an illustrator and chief designer of their children's magazine TARGET. Since Bizeth was already producing for DD, he asked her to send a proposal for 15 min slot. He was somehow confident of sailing through. It was difficult to convince DD since they didn't have substantial work to show. The approval came only after submitting the first episode as a pilot (then there was no norm of submitting full episode as pilot).
The stories were quickly spun out by Basu's author friends of TARGET(Viji Ghose, Rupa Gupta, Viswajita Das).
It took him five years of back breaking work to complete the project with support of a skeleton team of 6 assistants. Ghayab was first telecast in July 1990 on DD national network, Sunday morning before Mahabharat.
After Ghayab Aya, he started his own company - Raikhik Films and continues doing 2D animation projects.
Here are two of his recently done projects.
Character and Animation Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g2O5hqnsv4
Animation Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUpseDJ27LM
