A dialogue with the past

Amarjot Kaur

In 2015, an editor and animator at Hollywood in Los Angeles, 27-year-old Hansjeet Duggal met up with Jonathan Hirsch, an award-winning writer from the southern shores of Cape May, over a cup of coffee in Orange County. Their conversation meandered from films and books to animation and work, until it reached their personal lives. Jonathan’s grandparents had survived the Holocaust and Hansjeet’s parents had braved the anti-Sikh riots of 1984.

“"We were connecting through the emotional understanding of fear and hope, triggered by two incidents that transpired during different time periods at different places," says Hansjeet while detailing the starting point of his virtual-reality animation project, titled Freiheit (which means freedom in German), on World War II.

“Freiheit is a thematic journey of sacrifice, fear and hope told through a young Jewish kid entering a concentration camp during World War II," says Hansjeet. Shot in 360 degrees and spanning four minutes, the film is an account of the traumatic events that threaten the Jewish mother (Helga) and her kid's survival at the camp. Freiheit's story begins on a train carrying several people to the Auschwitz camp. "We wanted to preserve history through virtual reality and augmented reality. The idea is to get people to interact with the past by being a part of it, emotionally,” he adds.

With his project, Chandigarh-lad Hansjeet made an emphatic mark at Stereopsia held recently at Brussels—an international forum dedicated to all artistic, technological, content, and business facets of 3D immersion—being one of the 10 participants out of over 100 shortlisted contenders across the world. The international event was organised in collaboration with the Hollywood-based Advanced Imaging Society, VR Society and their EMEA Chapter.

Having been mentored by Hollywood experts, like Thomas Harris, Hansjeet took into consideration every frame of the film to evoke an emotional reaction from the audience. "Since emotions were this Virtual Reality project's starting point, it was challenging to get the characters to act well. In animation, one's drawing defines the character and act of the actor," adds Hansjeet.

Hansjeet fell in love with animation at the age of eight, and started sketching cartoons. He earned a masters degree in Animation in 2013 from Jaipur’s Birla Institute of Technology. “I was studying B.Com at Lovely Professional University, but wanted to pursue animation. BIT Jaipur is one of the only three colleges that give a masters degree in animation,” he informs.

His first animation film on Mata Gujri, titled Dhan Jannani, was picked up by SikhNet Youth Film Festival in 2013. Next year, he was asked to make a film on the 100th anniversary of World War I. “That’s when I made a three-minute fiction film on Sikhs who fought during World War I,” he says.

In three years, Hansjeet has made more than 10 animation films, with influences ranging from animators, writers, and filmmakers. “I read a lot of literature, from Shakespeare to Kafka and Prem Chand to Haruki Murakami and literature has inspired me a great deal. I am also inspired by animators like Sylvain Chomet, Hayao Miyazaki, and Glen Keane,” he signs off.

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