Ninaad Kulkarni: Capturing timeless frames

Ninaad Kulkarni’s three-minute film KCLOC has won many laurels
Image: Aditi Tailang

Ninaad Kulkarni | 27
3D Artist, Animation Filmmaker
Category: Design

Ninaad Kulkarni was fascinated with the concept of time. It slowed down at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, where he was studying animation film production (2010-2014), but raced ahead at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, where he moved for an MFA in Computer Art (2015-2017). “If time was personified I was always running behind,” says the animation filmmaker from Mumbai.

His investigation into the plurality of time culminated in his three-minute graduation film KCLOC (an anagram of clock), a 3D animated documentary, where he captures its varied perceptions.

The actors in the film are ten meticulously designed CGI characters, from all walks of life, in a variety of real-world settings, responding to a single question: "What does time mean to you?. He used a variety of timekeeping devices as faces of his characters.

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In 2017, Kulkarni won the Best Student Documentary Film at Raw Science Film Festival, California, and was a semi-finalist at the 44th Student Oscars, while in 2018, he won a raft of awards, including Red-Dot, the AT&T Film Award for animated short, and the Scinema award, Australia. KCLOC has been screened at 120 film festivals across the globe, but the invitation to showcase it at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, by Kathy Brew, the guest curator, is what he considers most special.

“The film is a fresh insight into the meaning of time and its relative impact on an individual’s perception. The personification of characters expertly amplified the feelings conveyed through the audio transcripts with beautifully rendered 3D/2D/live-action design,” says Terrence Masson, chair of the MFA Computer Art department at SVA and Kulkarni’s instructor. “To stand out in a place like SVA was not just about creating great art... he was always proactive, helping others and pushing himself harder to create new opportunities after graduation.”

There was a time when the aspiring leg-spinner was caught between his two passions—cricket and art. Today, he has no regrets.