What is the story like?
The film, in short, is the story of a chick named Chiclet and its family who live happily in a jungle. One day the parents of the chick are walking in the jungle, when fate suddenly takes a turn and the mother chick is killed by a human for his selfish purpose. The father chick in an attempt to save his wife also gets captured by the human unable to fight against the human strength. Learning about his parent’s fate, the Chiclet treads on a path to find his father and decides to rescue his only surviving parent from the clutches of the humans.

Does the film revolve in a jungle only?
No, the chick comes to Mumbai where he meets a Don who, with the passage of time, helps him nab the murderer.

Tell us about the message you convey through the film?
Through this film we are attempting to show the world that we should love animals and let them live just as we live freely. Our objective is to spread awareness among the youth about the atrocities caused on animals and learn to respect them.

We are also sending in a strong message to discourage consumption of non-vegetarian food that we feel is one of the prime reasons of global warming.

How and who conceived the story?
The project was conceived one-and-half years ago. But we decided to do the film ourselves as we were not quite satisfied with the final animation quality of our first project My Friend Ganesha. So our first aim was to set up our own studio where we could do our film to our satisfaction. Accordingly, we set up our studio last August but it took two months to start our activities. But not wanting to waste time we went ahead with the scripting and the screenplay work that was also written by Mehta. Once the studio was set up, the artistes here got engaged with the project.

What was the first step that you undertook?
As is the normal process, we went into the storyboarding process. This is the process in which whatever is written (script) turns into drawing. We have about a dozen artists doing the storyboarding process. For this, Mehta took a lot of pain because every drawing had to be approved by him. The process was very painstaking and took a lot of time. Like for a seven-minute sequence it used to take as long as 10 to 15 days. Every artist and the director was working in sync.

What was the next step?
Firstly, let me say that we are doing this film in 2D traditional in which every frame is drawn. As the next step, we got into the process of animation when our artistes, as a first step, started animating major movements, the in-betweens. The output in this process was around 24 frames per second. It was very heartening to see the whole team working in sync. On the whole seven minutes of output took as long as 45 days. We are taking all the pain because we want to make the film on the lines of Finding Nemo and Jungle Book.

What followed?
The next step was digital inking and painting where each frame were coloured. Each painted drawing was scanned and taken into computer after which it was coloured. Simultaneously our background artists started with doing the backgrounds. A quality of a film is recognised by the number of backgrounds it has. In this process what eventually counts is skill, patience and money. After this process is the post-production and colour correction process to be accompanied by special effects and dubbing.

How many songs are there in your film?
The film has seven songs sung by the likes of Kunal Ganjawala, Jagjit Singh, Abhijeet Sawant. Interesting my film has three music directors namely Laxmi Vasant, Rajesh and Anamik Chauhan.

How do you propose to market your film?
We are talking to a couple of corporates and are confident that looking at our message we want to send across and the quality of the film, Green Chic - Finding Dad will definitely find a decent buyer.