MIHIR LELE

Client

Amazon Prime Video

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Agency

VICE India ​

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Director

Jaydeep Sarkar​

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VP- Content, VICE

Samira Kanwar​

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Creative Director

Sneha Nair
 

Producer

Manisha Rajendran

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Character Illustrations

Pia Alizé Hazarika

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Design and Animation

Mihir Lele

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Music

Sushant Divgikr, OAFF, Savera

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Brief

Rainbow Rishta is a romantic documentary series that follows LGBTQ+ stories about finding and celebrating love across India - whether it is dating as a transwoman, planning a one of its kind rainbow wedding, trying to rent a home as a young lesbian couple or figuring out a long term relationship as a gay couple.

I was approached by the creative team at VICE India to design and animate the title sequence for the series. 

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The brief was to take the pre-existing illustrations of the protagonists from the series (illustrated by the very talented Pia Alizé Hazarika) and create a well rounded title sequence that put the protagonists at the centre of it.

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The concept

After brainstorming on a number of concepts for the sequence and different treatment ideas for the same, we zeroed-in on a concept that put the protagonists in the limelight.

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The title sequence shows each of the 6 protagonists convert into an illustration, match cutting from live action footage, and key elements from their narrative in the show pop up around them.

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The sequence also had to, very briefly, describe the crux of the documentary series via text. The text "6 stories of finding, accepting and celebrating LOVE" is stitched into the title sequence for narrative hygiene.

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All 6 layouts are tied together using colored swirls that come together at the end, to highlight the title of the series. The colors of the swirls as well as the layouts for each protagonist were chosen as per the colors of the flag representing the community that the protagonist identified with. For example, pink and blue 

layout and swirls were  for the Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju, who identifies as transgender, as per the transgender flag,  red and orange for a lesbian couple, Sanam and Anees, as per the lesbian flag and so on.

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Small animated gifs were designed to add some dynamism to each screen once the elements placed themselves in the layout.