Ishu Patel
Ishu Patel
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Ishu Patel

Ishu Patel is an Indian-Canadian animation film director/producer and educator. During his twenty-five years at the National Film Board of Canada he developed animation techniques and styles to support his themes and vision. Since then he has produced animated spots for television and has been teaching internationally.

Ishu Patel was born on 20 April 1942, in the State of Gujarat, India.

He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from M.S.University of Baroda, Gujarat, following which he was accepted into the first cohort of faculty trainees hired at the newly formed National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

This was an exceptional design school created by the Government of India under the auspice of the influential industrialist family of Gautam and Gira Sarabhai. The school was based upon the recommendations and philosophy of the American industrial designers Ray and Charles Eames, as found in The India Report.

Through a Ford Foundation Grant provided to the National Institute of Design, Ishu Patel was able to finish his post graduate studies in Graphic Design under Armin Hoffman at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland, and returned to the National Institute of Design where he taught and became Head of Visual Communications.

A Rockefeller Foundation Scholarship brought Ishu Patel to the National Film Board of Canada to study animation filmmaking for a year, and in 1972 he joined the NFB where, for the next twenty-five years under the NFB mandate Ishu Patel produced and directed animated films and mentored young animation filmmakers.

There he both adapted and originated several notable techniques: in the abstract film Perspectrum he adapted the Norman McLaren technique of multiple passes and variable exposures; the films Afterlife and Top Priority were the result of accidentally discovering, and then developing, the under-lit plasticine technique; for the film Paradise he developed the under-lit pin hole technique with multiple passes; and for The Bead Game he created the procedures for moving thousands of tiny beads under an ever-zooming-outward camera.

He co-produced animation projects with NHK of Japan and Channel Four of Britain, and contributed French language segments to Sesame Street for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

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