My Older Brother

The brief

My Older Brother is an animated GIF book adapted from Munshi Premchand’s short story My Elder Brother. It follows two brothers and the weight of academic expectation, the elder repeatedly failing his exams while lecturing the younger, who keeps passing without trying. It’s a story about rivalry, love, and an education system that measures the wrong things.

I made it with StoryWeaver, the open-storytelling platform from Pratham Books. The format is a picture book that moves, each spread is a full illustration with a small animation looping on top, so the page feels alive without leaving the shape of a book.

The approach

This was made at home, during COVID, from a small setup squeezed into whatever room had the right light. The constraint shaped the work: no studio, no big rig, just a tablet and a corner. I leaned into a workflow I could run alone, end to end , illustrate the spread, then add the small looping motion that brings it to life.

The animation is deliberately restrained. A picture book earns its stillness; the movement is there to draw the eye to one thing per page, not to turn the book into a film. Most spreads move in one small place and hold everywhere else.

The work

Two things to show: how the pages were made, and how they came out.

The whole book was built at home during lockdown, on a setup that moved around the house chasing daylight. The process pages track each spread from thumbnail to inked frame to final looping GIF , with a few photos of the very modest rig it was all made on.

The finished spreads, shown with and without text. Some pages read clean, as pure illustration; others carry the story’s words. Each one loops a small motion, a turning head, a flickering lamp, a page within the page.