Hello everyone, I am Nitish Chopra, an aspiring animator and an established dreamer.

My love affair with the field of Animation started when I saw Kungfu Panda as a young kid. The attachment early on was mostly due to the identification that I had with “Po – the panda”. His story was exactly mine, a guy who was trying to find his place in the world. It was only later that I started appreciating the nuances of this medium – the way the story was pictorially represented – the eye brow movements, or the different kungfu poses, each and every detail was awe inspiring. This really got me interested into the domain of animation and design and I started creating sketches.

This interest in creating something of my own was further kindled by a hobby class that I started in school – Robotics. I started my work on the Robotronics Design System and I am really happy I pursued it. It has instilled in me the ability to look at problems systematically. Before, we started designing any Robot – we had to ascertain its purpose (i.e. Its form and its function). Once the functionality was defined, we had to identify what would be the different constituents of the Robot and we would then set out at developing at each of these constituents and finally integrate them.

When you build Robots, you have to work on the Mechanical Design, its electronic circuitry and its programming. Although I learnt and enjoyed all these aspects, I enjoyed Mechanical Designing the most. I must admit that the process, of designing a model and then reconfiguring it hundred times till it got perfect, was frustrating but very fulfilling. This ability to persist, with designing, cemented my place in our School’s Robotics team. We represented our School at the IRC League for five consecutive years and am proud to share that we won the league two times during this period.

I kept on pursuing my interests in the field of Animation/sketching by the side. However, it was really in Grade XI (after watching the cartoon Naruto) that I decided on what would be my future area of work.

Not only was Naruto’s script, of transformation of a boy’s simple dream to his mission for humanity’s greater good, excited me but also the ability of this medium (animation) to create a complete imaginary world with incredible detailing. I could not help but wonder the fact that animated media holds far larger potential than the live action movies. Animation helps us achieve what we may never be able to through live action movies. Not only this, in the animated media we hold much greater control over each and every detailed movement of our actors; from blink of an eye to the movement of each hair follicle; a feat that is impossible to achieve through live action movies.

For the rest of my life, I imagine waking up to a life with complete freedom to roam as wild as I wish in this art of storytelling and I believe it’s in these very stories and tales of a universe that our mind fabricates, lies the key to transformation of our material society and this very fact is what pushes me to pursue this art. Utopian Tales is  manifestation of this very dream, a medium/platform under the name of which I’ll constantly be publishing all my works/projects.

Through this blog I’ll share some events ( and challenges as i have encountered ) and information that might be useful to a designing student; and I’ll time by time also upload some of my creative works ( of course I would; you’d be insanely daft thinking I’d do all the other crap without some self-promotion and selfish benefits! 😛 )