Rucha Dhayarkar

When I spoke to Rucha, the one thing that I got about her was that she breaks down things in a really nuanced manner. I guess that’s a skill one masters after working for years in a creative field which requires a lot of introspection and bouts of thinking in between the different stages of the creative process. Today, she is a stop motion artist, who is also freelancing. The story of how she stumbled upon her calling is long and arduous yet a familiar tale, one which a multitude of creatives might relate to.

Soon after getting into Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, she decided to take on film making as a discipline to study in her under-graduation. The reason being, it was something that she had always been fascinated with. In Rucha’s words, ‘Film is something which opens up different worlds for you’ and so, she completed her film making from Srishti and spent four years working under different job roles in different industries. While she worked in film and advertising, she also worked in Max Mueller Bhavan, so that she could learn German. Now, the fact that she spent four years working and familiarising herself with the film industry before going in for a Masters points to her industrious nature. Furthermore, she tells me about her journey of  determination to not settle for a career path which didn't align with her innermost values and desires.

Stop motion is something which stemmed out of the skills that she discovered along the way and an inclination that had found her when she was a little girl. Rucha always loved making things. She loved working with her hands. Even though she got distanced from it for a while, it always stayed at the back of her mind. The ability to work with a camera and shoot films was introduced to her in college and the challenge that it presented due to it’s unfamiliarity with her, further lured her in. It was through her arduous journey of dabbling in different things did she come to discover that stop motion might just be what she had been looking for all along.

Just browse through her Instagram handle and you would come across a bunch of quirky clay characters which embody a childlike innocence along with a certain sense of emotiveness. Lot of these are a part of a 100 day project in which Rucha intends to create 100 different characters, each with their own background narrative. They have been placed in different settings to add context. Furthermore, a stop motion film which she worked on with three others while she was studying Stop Motion Animation at Bau, Design College of Barcelona, was chosen to be a part of the Cannes Short Film Corner. The film is called ‘From the same thread’. It’s also been widely admired in various film festivals.

Rucha’s creative process is one which is extremely spontaneous just like a lot of other creatives and her work, more often than not, takes from her own feelings and the people around her, the ones she encounters in her day to day life. Today, for her, creative fulfilment and sustenance are cut from the same cloth. She includes both in her life by way of client projects and personal projects.

She is currently working on an Illustrated Children’s book for Pratham Books and a small personal project of her own.