“I was a day late in remitting my fees at Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani. Otherwise I would have been an engineer,” reminisces Shukla. “Jabalpur was a small town in those days and I did not have many options left. But my father was an inquisitive man and brought home this clipping of a news feature about a design school in Ahmedabad.” Inquiries led nowhere as not many knew of the school. However, Shukla’s application went through and he was asked to take a written exam in erstwhile Bombay. “I guess the National Institute of Design’s (NID) tests were probably the strangest I have ever taken. It lasted over 3 days and I was asked to draw, make models, write stories...” The exhaustive psycho-metric tests give tremendous insights into a candidate’s thinking process, and Shukla was chosen to attend the final interviews. “I was honest at the interview. I told the panel that I spoke little or no English and they could choose to interview me for a whole day in English or speeden it up by speaking Hindi with me,” laughs Shukla.

When Shukla finally came to attend the five-year program at the school, he was still the “boy-from-a-small-town,” yet he managed to find his feet quickly enough. “I think NID is still a great institute that teaches students to revere unstructured thinking,” says Shukla. NID had then received some video-editing equipment from UNICEF, and Shukla was quick to try his hand on them. “But then I realized that if I wanted to learn film-editing, I would be better off at the Film Institute in Pune. There had to be more to this, where I could use my skills of graphic design with the technology.” Shukla’s first amateur project was a 20-minute film of the school’s Autumn Festival, which he recorded on moving film, cut to music, added titles and to which he added some basic animation. The hilarious entertainer won him the institute’s respect, and he went on to experiment with more animation tools. “My final project was a study on integrating graphic design with film, and I designed a study course as my thesis,” remembers Shukla.

He then took up Reliance subsidary, Mudra’s offer as a film executive. But it didn’t last long, as Shukla felt he was missing out on something. “At that time, a friend of mine in Delhi had set up this new work station, which could paint and draw, and she wanted me to learn and work on it. I needed no second bidding,” says Shukla. He moved to Delhi, where he started learning “Paint” on the Aurora 75. “The manuals were quite horrible at that time, and I had to learn on the system. I rememer this client from Dabur who was doing a presentation for her company, and she wanted an image of a human brain, with some airbrush effect on it. I took the whole night to discover this tool, and finally, at 3 a.m., I managed to complete it,” laughs Shukla. While this learning progressed, he did various projects for Lintas (now Lowe Lintas) in New Delhi. After about two years, he went back to teach his “designed” course at the NID, where he was also dating his future wife, Anna, a Singaporean and a junior in the industrial design stream.

“Post-NID, I worked on almost every kind of project—graphic design, corporate identity, exhbitions, animations, film titles, edits, commercial ads, documentaries—you name it,” recalls Shukla. One of his biggest project was on the annual golf tournament for KLM Airlines. “I hired 25 wedding film makers from Delhi, coached them on the types of shots I was looking for, shot, edited and streamed in the film at the gala that followed an hour after the tournament. I got paid half in cash and the other half in barter tickets. I flew to Singapore...where else?” laughs Shukla. On one of his flights back to India, he met up with the chairman of the Singapore Design Council, who was running a presentation business, which made marketing presentation slides for corporate clients. “He wanted to expand into animation and multimedia and was exactly the kind of person I was looking for. And in 1989, I took up his offer and moved to Singapore,” recalls Shukla.

The job involved missionary work, where Shukla had to sell the concept and then his company to clients, and business wasn’t easy. “Somehow, I have always worked according to a now-familiar pattern: the company interested in me buys a system, I learn the system, then hire people and train them, and then move on,” says Shukla. He heard that Sydney was a big market, where technology was far superior to Singapore and clients were more international. At PictureStart, Shukla worked extensively on animation and special effects for television commercials. “I think that was my best experience. In those three-and-a-half-years in Sydney, I learned a lot of technology. I also noticed work from HongKong coming to Sydney and Singapore. We all thought that Singapore would become the preferred hotspot, once HongKong moved back to China. I moved back to Singapore,” says Shukla.

That boom in business never transpired. But Singapore was gearing up for the future and the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation was setting up a massive infrastructure for its digital entertainment. “The government was investing heavily in the post-production business, and I saw some big projects from regional clients,” recalls Shukla. “That was when Jurassic Park happened. Around the same time, I had worked on an independent project, called Thandav, on the dance forms of Shiva. My friends in Canada who saw it urged me to enter it for the SIGGRAPH awards. When I came to the U.S. for the awards, I saw the animation and special effects market booming and everybody was making dinosaurs stalk the city!” laughs Shukla.

He went back with five job offers. And in 1995, he joined Digital Domain. “It was tough at the beginning. Nobody knew of my previous work and my showreel didn’t fetch much conviction. I continued nevertheless, and my skills and work in the Island of Munroe won me wide respect and they gave me the post of supervisor,” recalls Shukla. “I became the fire-fighter. While the technology was there, not many knew how to exploit it. When they needed a fire or an earthquake, the cry ‘Call Umesh’ would go around,” says a proud Shukla. At that time, he heard that James Cameron—“Jim” to friends—was working on two stories: Titanic and Avatar. Shukla didn’t pay much attention to them as he felt there was not much that he could do in either of the films. The studio-in-charge insisted that he read the script of Titanic, and Shukla was instantly hooked. “I saw so many challenges in the script for a SFX team and signed on. I created a pipeline of 27 walking cycles to get those 800 people on the deck walk, talk, skip, swim, and drown. Jim was a great man to work with, and forcing people to focus on minute details—learning was god,” recalls Shukla.

After the exhausting experience that was Titanic, Shukla was reading many script offers that came his way, but felt that none was challenging enough. At that time, Disney was making Dinosaur and was setting up a new facility. “I met the various teams over a month, but wasn’t too interested in what they were doing, and doubted if they could afford me. But a fortnight later, Disney called me back to offer me the position of Digital SFX Supervisor for all of Disney,” says Shukla. That meant that he could work with independent teams on multi-faceted projects, right from story to character development to team management. “It was a good growth for me. I learned to handle emergencies, people, directors. Luckily, I had no temperamental actors to contend with,” laughs Shukla.

An aborted film—that was very good experience in itself—later, Shukla started questioning the medium. “All characters were flat, which left them as inanimate forms themselves. I wanted to explore this further. People were using the computer as a tool to help, not as a tool itself. I went back to being a designer and gave in to my creative urge to explore. I heard of this famous director in Chicago, who was urging the industry to move from creating images that were simply recognized to create symbols that could be understood,” says Shukla.

Currently on a three month sabbatical, Shukla has been working on his own, and has put up his latest: Still I Rise, an exploration of form in 3 dimensions. He is also working on Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Bach’s epic novel. He goes back to Disney in the fall this year, to continue on the SFX team.

He is also exploring the possibility of animating Indian stories at Disney, which he feels has stopped at Kipling’s Jungle Book. “I feel that this is a great industry for India to explore,” he says.