Selection of the participants for the workshop.

Over thirty people responded to a recent advertisement for the Animation Workshop in the local “Sangai” newspaper and the final selection of participants took place at 11.30am on 22 February at the Manipur Film Development Corporation Complex in Imphal.

The organising committee for the workshop assembled and the interviews began. Some of the applicants were not able to attend and ultimately it was unanimously decided that all those interviewed would eligible to join the workshop, which starts on Saturday.

23 participants are now confirmed; I was disappointed to observe that not a single female had applied, and that all the applicants are from the Meitei community –so there is currently no representation from the 33 tribes in Manipur. Speculating on the reason for this - Perhaps the advertisement implied that applicants needed to be experienced animators and artists, as most of them already have impressive CVs; I am told that art is a new subject for the tribal communities and as I become more familiar here I notice the formal artistic sensibilities acquired through art school training and exposure – and that this may have been intimidating.
The attitude to the workshop is serious. With the existing technical experience of the group, participants may be impatient to plunge straight into the animation, created through various 2D and 3D software. The style of the film will be their decision; will they be able to move away from the aesthetics of commercially produced animation and be ready to experiment? And what if they were to work on a tribal folktale as a group of Meitei participants?

I am encouraged that Samson S. Meitei has already worked on “Illustrated Folktales of Manipur” (2010, Imphal, published by LInthoingambi Publications,in Meitelon language), that others have worked on "Keibu Kei-oiba", (a Meitei folktale about a tiger-man), and that Debdatta Heikrujam has already animated a sequence of the mythical Pakhangba python that seems to be all important in Meitei culture.