It has been a month since Hazel and I wound up our Visual Storytelling course at CEPT. I have been meaning to write about our four-month-long course for quite some time, but the daily stuff kept pushing it to the side. When Hazel called me last year about taking a course together at CEPT, I was a little hesitant to take it up because work on my book had been pending and I had decided to dedicate more time to it. Even Hazel was unsure of it, but we have been talking to each other about taking a course together for so long that letting this opportunity go wasn’t an easy choice. Working as By Two Design, and Perch Project, has been a leap of faith, and for the CEPT course, we decided to do the same. It was daunting to take a four-month-long course, but it was always relieving to know that we were taking this course together.
Since these kids were not from a graphic design background, taking a strictly typography/illustration course felt like an unfair offering. Hazel and I have always been driven by stories in our work. My work on the graphic novel comes from the urge to tell my story, and Hazel’s Edible Heirloom is her way of preserving heartfelt stories with the goodness of cooking. We use our skills to facilitate the telling of these stories, and at the end of the day, our task is essentially of a storyteller. Stories and articulating them visually felt like something that could sustain the interest of students over a four-month-long period, and also make them see value in it to take it back to their discipline and apply it. We had grand plans, and to kick things off it all had to be put in a seven-minute-long video presentation. The amount of goofing up and fumbling we had to go through to overcome our embarrassment and put this video was a joke in itself. We rehearsed, scripted our words, and slashed the details to their core to get the video out. Thankfully, we managed to get 12 students for our studio. Some opted for it as their first preference, and a few as their seventh preference. Clearly, we had a job at our hand to catch the interest of these kids like you grab a scattered egg yellow out of its white.
One of the warm-up exercises done by the students related to Typography
I won’t go into the week by week detail, but we soon realised that the standards we had set in terms of output were not being met at all. Maybe the pandemic had broken the will of these students to work and persevere, maybe the isolation had taken away any group dynamism you need to make it a healthy exchange of knowledge. Hazel, Shrenee (our very resourceful and helpful TA), and I would keep wondering after every few weeks as to why are we falling short. We did realise that we need to slow down the learning to allow them time to accomplish one task well at least to let the confidence seep in. Teaching if not going well can be a very slippery slope, and if there are no milestones that the teacher or student can see then it becomes a way of being removed. Hazel and I would feel exhausted on many days because of how much mentally you have to stay invested. My plans of working on the book on the side with the studio going on also slowed down heavily because even though you have only classes on alternate days, the day in-between just went into recuperating. This was new for us, and it was new for the kids too, but we didn’t want to give up. There were also many things in terms of the institutional process that came our way as a surprise, and we had to readjust our course structure heavily to buy time for the students to work on their final project.
Sketches of students while discussing their work over zoom call.
We had offered a mix of beginner’s typography, image-making, illustration, and abstraction techniques to enable the students to visually put together a story belonging to a community that they would reach out to. The idea of a community was very broad because we wanted them to look at people who are bound by a shared experience, and not necessarily look at a community in its traditional sense. At this point, the classes had become offline, so Hazel really helped the students to streamline their process. The last two years have also chained us within our spaces, so reaching out to anyone new was in itself a daunting task for the students. By the end of the last month, our job was mainly to push them to stick to a timeline, work backwards on their deliverable, and direct them to the right references and resources. The very heartening thing to see was the progress being shown in thinking independently of their ideas. When we started, we had to spoon-feed a little to the students, and we detested doing that, so as teachers/educators, our biggest achievement was to see the students taking charge of their work, and ideas, and developing a sense of ownership towards it. The most important value you want to see from a student is to problem-solve their way out of a situation, and when it comes from them then the confidence it provides is unparalleled.
We ended the course with an exhibition, and while we were relieved, Hazel, Shrenee and I had a degree of pride in how we managed to steer the course. We did have our ups and downs, and there are quite a few things we will do differently if we take the course again, but you live and learn, right?
Tired yet happy faces after wrapping up the course.
Also, there is another small story behind the CEPT course. After passing my twelfth board exams, I was preparing for getting into Design and Architecture colleges. My interest was in animation those days, and architecture came along on the list from a coaching centre I was going to because they offered preparatory exercises that covered NID and CEPT. CEPT was the premier institute to get into. If you are not a Gujrati and fell into the General category, then you had to get a rank in the top five in their entrance test to have a chance of being a CEPT student. I had given NID exams earlier that year with no coaching or guidance, and I couldn’t clear the written tests. I had been attending the coaching in Delhi for a month before CEPT exams were due. I had gotten into Srishti by the time the CEPT exams came up. I was debating in my head whether to go ahead in Design or try Architecture. I was staying at my cousin’s place in Ahmedabad for the test days. My cousin had studied exhibition design at NID, so seeking his opinion was natural in my career choices. As an elder cousin, he was guarded about my choice to not pursue a more mainstream career choice. Maybe he was all too familiar with the struggle waiting ahead, but he suggested that I stick to Design if Animation is what fascinates me. I still went for the first day of the entrance test at CEPT. The campus was huge, and it did seem like an architecture college with its exposed walls and monolithic shapes. I had the Interior Design exam on day one, and in my head, I could see myself withdrawing already from the test. It was summer with heat waves outside, and my cousin was going to Mount Abu for a few days. I didn’t know what came over me, but I decided to not appear for the rest of the exams and went to Abu instead. I went to Bangalore and joined Srishti, didn’t end up studying Animation (my interests had moved towards Graphic Design and Illustration), but somewhere it always did prick me a little that I didn’t appear and get into one of the best colleges for architecture in India. I think it nagged me more back then because I had just come out of a very competitive environment, and the thing with such spaces is that it blinds you from seeing what you want to do. All you see is the merit list, no matter if the list is the one you should be actually on. So after all these years, when the opportunity to teach at CEPT came in, in some way it was redemptive for me to go to the same institute where I didn’t appear for the entrance test.
