Alaav is a remake of Priyakanksha’s film school project called ‘Monster’s Bonfire’, a stop-motion animation film she made with stick figures and paper cut-outs. Those figures served as an inspiration to the talking puppets used in the movie now, the rakshasaas.
Inspired by the use of stop-motion animation to further the cause of unity in diversity in Vijay Mulley’s 1974 Doordarshan film “Ek Anek aur Ekta”, Alaav aims to have a similar impact on the tobacco awareness cause.
The way the little cigarette-rakshasaas create havoc at home in this film is the same way smoking tobacco affects the body. Parts of the house are representational of the human body – the switchboard cracking are teeth breaking down, the dough darkening is the skin pigmenting over time, the encased “winged” showpiece darkening is the lungs filling up with tar, the watermelon bursting depicts a heart attack, the rakshasaas Entangling the “beaded strings depict blocked arteries and so on.
The audio medium is a soundtrack with vocals by Javed Jaffrey in his inimitable bad-guy style reminiscent of his character Jaffer in the film Aladdin, bringing the rakshasaas to life, describing how smoking tobacco deteriorates the body over time.
Alaav is made to create awareness
via four mediums
Print
Audio
Digital
Audio-visual
COMIC SCANS
Priyakanksha created a hand-made comic book for Alaav, which was a major part of the film’s editing process and served as a backbone to build the movie from, along with it serving as the blueprint to the print medium.
NFTs
NFTs round up the final way Alaav reaches out to audiences, in the digital sphere, with every unique character available as an NFT on the website with a unique name.
Alaav is a satirical film with unique rakshasaas that are handmade puppets with moving mouths as they proudly lure you into causing damage to your body.
