Under 25 Summit: An amalgam of design, animation and dreams
- The second day of the event was dedicated to design.
- Aditya Mehta, an art curator, exhorted the audience to keep innovating.
- The final two days of the event are expected to see larger crowds.
FollowThe second day (January 6) of the Under 25 Summit continued to maintain the heady momentum associated with the event and was dedicated to art and design. The finale was hosted at the Indigo Live Music Bar, which played to a packed house.
The day began with the screening of short animation movies created by Indian animators including Oscar-nominated Schirkoa by Ishan Shukla, Fakir by Varun Nair, and Shaheed Udham Singh.
The first speaker to take to the stage was Aditya Mehta, the founder of Art&Found, a website that curates artwork by Indian artists from across the world. He talked about his journey and gave three tips for designing to the enthusiastic crowd. Mehta says designing is a fresh approach to familiar things, so design for your grandmother; second, design with empathy making your work user-friendly and third, design for humanity.
A great piece of advice for budding designers was that since money was scarce at their young age, the only asset is time — so, create faster, fail faster, learn faster and move on faster.
After Mehta’s session was the “5 by 3” session, which consisted of five-minute talks by three speakers. The speakers were Ganesh Raj, the writer and director of Aanandam; Kaveri Gopalakrishnan, comic maker and illustrator and artist Poornima Sukumar of the Aravani Art Project.
Raj spoke about Aanandam, his youth-centric, coming-of-age movie and its design aspects. In terms of design, he spoke about the cast, costume, and promotion strategy of Aanandam and how his team turned the supposed negative aspects of his movie into positive aspects, making it a great success.
Gopalakrishnan, one of the eight artists of Kadak Collective, spoke about her journey into making art and illustrations and using graphic novels as a medium of storytelling, using pages from her work. Earlier in the day, Kadak Collective also hosted a reading room session at the NUMA coworking space for the Under 25 Summit.
Sukumar also had an elaborate session earlier the day and in the finale, she spoke about her project and how it came into existence. Apart from the sessions, the finale also had lively music and the crowd response was enthusiastic.
The last two days of the Under 25 Summit are expected to see a larger crowd as they are being organised on the weekend. The third day (January 7) will focus on the theme of food and the grand finale (January 8) will feature Arnab Goswami, Tanmay Bhat, Kenny Sebastian, Danish Sait and many other prominent personalities.
