Partition Memory Project
Role: Creative Technologist, Motion Designer
When independent India awoke to its freedom at the stroke of midnight in August 1947, millions lost their homes and histories. As their final act, the British Raj split India into two nations: India and Pakistan. Dividing the world’s most heterogeneous country— spurring history’s largest mass migration and years of chaos, violence and murder.
With up to 20 million people affected and a million dead, the Partition is the most defining event in the modern history of the Subcontinent. Despite its importance, few memorials exist that document what was lost.
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Under the vision of Aanvik Singh, the Partition Memory Project is a multi-lingual automated video system that allowed anyone to create a video about the partition by simply by inputting text and uploading images in a Google Form. The goal was to make storytelling accessible to people without creative or technical backgrounds. I was responsible for developing a data-driven solution to automate Adobe After Effects rendering workflows. These inputs were then processed by AE templates prepared by Aanvik.
System Architecture
In the diagram below, I mapped and built an end-to-end pipeline that turned a simple online form into a fully rendered video. The experience begins with a Google Form, where users contribute their stories without ever touching creative tools. Their inputs flow into Google Sheets and are transformed by Apps Script into a structured JSON file. From there, an EC2 server orchestrates Nexrender jobs, and a dedicated worker node runs After Effects and the respective project files and compositions headlessly to produce the final .mov files.
This work was the culmination of prototyping the experience from both the user and system perspectives; sketching JSON payloads, exploring low-fidelity form interactions, mapping flows, and running early Nexrender tests.
To learn more about the process, visit my wiki page.
Credits
Creative Director, Designer, Animator: Aanvik Singh
Producer: Alexandera Marca
Copywriter: Emily McDowell
Technical Direction: Desmond Du
