Background and Concept Art

A fun crime caper set in the ‘Belgium of Bihar – the only crime free village in India’ was just screaming for an animated title sequence. The director Sonam referred us to an olden goldie – the title sequence done by Ram Mohan for the bollywood film- Do Jasoos 

We further discussed references from legendary films like Catch Me if You Can, works of Saul Bass, the Pink Panther etc.

We were also very inspired by the 50’s Animation style the UPA animation style.

All these ideas coalesced into the first style frames we created for Dupahiya.

Character Design : Getting it right

The Producers and directors loved the styling and we were onboard.

Next they sent us a very specific colour guide per character which we had to integrate into the character design and caricature. We started sketching the characters and it took quite a few rounds with the director, producers and Amazon Prime to finally get the characters look right.

We really struggled to get the characters of the Heroine and the Renuka Sahani (who was super expressive) specially but finally they were bang on!

Animation Style and the final look

The animation style was another hill to cross. The director did not like the fully coloured look so we experimented with sketchy forms which were like the original storyboards which she loved. To get the style right we animated a couple of shots just to get everything in place.

The Storyboard

Honestly the storyboards got approved at the first go , we made minor changes to the story and flow of the boards but the transitions were pretty much locked at the first board level.

Title Design

The Title of a show is pretty much the most important part of a title sequence obviously but in our case it was a very simple title following the art style which was set first. We experimented with many fonts and even considered hand drawn typography at some point.

What we also loved was the combination of caps and small letters in the titles  – it added that fun element in the typography and summed up the chaotic nature of the show.

Post Production

Finally Nikon the master of post production did his magic with the textures to bring out the final look of the show.

Enjoy the Show!