Apple’s long-awaited entry into India’s retail landscape has often been accompanied by this common refrain – “We’ve had Apple reseller stores all these years, haven’t we? What’s so special about the official Apple Store?” It’s in the customer experience, a key aspect of which are the curated Today at Apple sessions that bring together visitors and local artists and professionals to build awareness around the craft and help customers make the most of their devices. At the newly launched Mumbai store, we saw a number of power packed Today at Apple sessions and got a chance to hear from the artists on their experience.
Envision a Mumbai sci-fi short with Arati Kadav
In her session, award-winning sci-fi director Arati Kadav did a deep dive into her creative process – on how she goes about storyboarding and scene development and finally onto filming, taking her storyboards from Procreate on the iPad onto the iPhone on which she has shot two feature films and eight shorts, including The Astronaut and His Parrot.
What was the turnout like at your session and who were the kind of people who attended the session?
The turnout was great with lots of folks from the artist community, especially young filmmaking students. The enthusiasm was real, and the vibe was very positive. I remember going home after the session and receiving at least seven social media messages where the participants were still cracking the sci-fi story and giving me alternative storyboards – I found that truly amazing!
Are there any takeaways in terms of experiences you heard from the audience that you found interesting?
In India, they say there is a dearth of sci-fi ideas. But when I gave them (the participants) a template of a sci-fi story to complete and storyboard using Procreate on their iPads, some of the participants came up with such rich interesting ideas that it surprised me. There were artists speaking of fantasy and sci-fi with so much happiness and confidence. As a person who is passionate about the genre in India, I found that a very memorable moment to learn that the young new age filmmakers are keen to make innovative fantasy stories, and that they were discovering tools to translate their abstract sci-fi ideas into a visual flow that they could go and shoot anytime.
What are your s for aspiring directors that you shared at the session you’d like to recount?
I think that aspiring directors in today's day and age should celebrate or announce their voice fearlessly as they have all the tools for the same. They need to work towards finding their tribe, finding their voice and work hard towards breaking the clutter with unique, well-executed ideas.
Exploring Mumbai with Battle Stars with SuperGaming founders Roby and Christelle
At their recent session last weekend, Pune-based SuperGaming founders Roby and Christelle unveiled new Mumbai characters ‘Techno’ and ‘Patil’, for their online multiplayer shooter game Battle Stars. Discussing the evolving gaming scene in the city, Roby John, CEO and co-founder, shared his thoughts on the session with us.
We saw packed audiences at your session, is that something you expected?
Our new game, Battle Stars, launched on iOS a couple of days before our session at Apple BKC. We did have some inkling that there’s a big audience for Battle Stars, what with a massive influx of players crashing the servers on launch day. However, to see that translate into real-world behavior with a full house was heartening to see – the audience was a healthy mix of teenagers, kids with their parents, and young adults, and a lot of them had played the game and even pre-registered prior to its release. It’s rare to see that kind of user behavior in a market like ours but it’s an interesting indicator that Indian gamers are ready for Indian games.
What are some of the tips you shared for game creators to break through in India?
India is ready for made-in-India games. However, our 450 million players need representation beyond simple, surface-level fare. Battle Stars isn't just labelled as a ‘made-in-India game’ and calling it a day, it has to be relatable. What this means is, the Mumbai map is replete with iconic locations from the city from the Sea Link to a vada pav stall, while Divya and Veer are based on what the Mumbai residents on our team felt were the qualities of a typical Mumbaikar – determination and kindness. In addition to this, working together with the community while making a game is crucial to get feedback. This involved playtests during our soft launch phase and at events like Comic Con Bengaluru, which helped evolve our gameplay and tighten our art direction. Even in our session, we involved the audience by having them pick the next playable hero (it ended up being Divya over Veer) and the name for the Mumbai map, Amchi Mumbai.
Along with this, it’s important to work with content creators. In our experience, they're great at telling the story of your game to wider audience. For Battle Stars, we partnered with Ujjwal Chaurasia (aka Techno Gamerz), but it wasn’t just him talking about our game or using his likeness in-game. He goes beyond a playable hero in Battle Stars – he's also deeply integrated through the game's Techno Quest, which has him entertaining players with banter and pep talk in-game as they play through it. What’s more, he provided valuable feedback that shaped the gameplay too. At our session, we took it a step further – Techno was at our session to give players his thoughts on this collaboration along with Mythpat (a Mumbai-based creator) that we had to help us reveal the Mumbai map as well as its Mumbai-themed heroes to the audience.
What were some of the nuggets you heard from the audience that served as key takeaways for you?
It’s always a welcome opportunity to see our players front, center, and in-person -it allows for a more free-flowing conversation. Aside from some extremely valid feedback around Battle Stars such as more maps based on different cities, it was great to see parents with their kids wanting to know more about game development as a career option. We had one young girl and her father talk to us about how they were unaware that games were even made in India, that it could be a viable career path, and how the session at Apple BKC opened them up to the idea of careers beyond the usual doctor, lawyer, and engineer options our country is usually known for. The entire experience left us feeling hopeful for the future of the Indian games industry.
Drawing homage to Mumbai with Kohla
We met Mira Felicia Malhotra, or Kohla as she’s also known, at the India Art Fair in February, where she wowed audiences with her bold, multicolored, beautifully hand-drawn (on iPad) family portraits. On the 25th of May, Mira will lead audiences at Apple BKC into drawn their own visual homages to the city using the iPad and the Procreate app. If you’re in Mumbai at the time and love your art bright and colourful, this is a session that will be well worth your time.
Leading on from your session at India Art Fair, could you talk us through your creative process and the tools you plan to show at your session?
In this session, I'm asking folks to do something I do quite often as an exercise for creating innovation and inspiration easily. The idea is to take abstract shapes and draw over them to find something new within the shapes, and quite possibly, repeating the exercise many, many times to truly break how we see some things more obviously, and how we can then push our visual ideas to see things we wouldn't have thought prior. I plan to show how to use the iPad and Apple Pencil to achieve this. The iPad offers us the space to make mistakes, do overs, and use the same shapes multiple times. I'll be using Procreate to draw in, and also teach simple animation.
(Tushar Kanwar is a tech columnist and commentator and tweets @2shar.)
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