How a Parul Institute of Design student turned family horror stories into Room No. 416, an award-winning stop-motion film

Room No. 416 is a six-minute silent horror film made with stop-motion animation by a team of seven first-year students at Parul Institute of Design, Parul University. The film was nominated at four film festivals, two national and two international.

Written and directed by Raghav Sharma, it runs on clay puppets, movement and sound with no dialogue at all, and it won Best Animation at the Cut-OK Film Festival and Best Sound Design at the ImagiNation International Student Film Festival.

The script is inspired by the stories exchanged at the family get-togethers between cousins. When Raghav and his cousins gathered, their talks would turn to horror stories, each person taking a turn, something that one of his sisters had told him was stuck, some stories shared by brothers had stuck with him. He took inspiration from all those horror stories and added his own ideas, brought it to the group, and they reworked it into a single narrative. The storytelling classes at PID, he says, are what taught him to build it around a conflict and a resolution rather than a string of scares.

Under the horror is a social point the whole team agreed upon. The story goes by, a family sets out to leave their daughter, who has a disability, at a facility, and the night in the hotel room changes the parent’s mind. “Every child deserves opportunity,” reads the line the team wrote for the ending. The haunting, as they frame it, is an argument for acceptance, not a revenge plot. Even the number carries intent: the team says 416 nods to Articles 14 to 16 of the Constitution, which concern equality.

Stop-motion is photography. The animators posed clay puppets, shot a frame, moved them a fraction, and shot again, more than seven thousand times over for six minutes of film. A wrong nudge between frames shows up as a jerk on screen, so the work is slow and unforgiving. Expressions meant repositioning the puppets’ eyebrows for each change, and when that proved too slow, the team learned to carry emotion through the tilt of a head and the set of a body instead.

The puppets themselves fought back. Made of clay, they softened in the un-air-conditioned rooms, lost their shape under the animators’ warm hands, and broke three or four times during the shoot. During the filming, the team faced challenges like the heads of puppets came off, clothes got torn and even at one point the characters were damaged beyond repair with the film half shot, and the team remade every one from scratch. As animator Satyam Tiwari points out, the opening looks cleaner than the middle: the beginning was shot last, with fresh puppets.

The decision Satyam is proudest of cost nothing. Most student stop-motion fixes the camera in one spot and lets the puppets do the moving. He wanted the camera to move too. With no rig to do it, the team balanced a phone on a cup set in a bowl, held with clay, and shifted it a little along a curve between frames, so the shot travels in an arc as the scene plays. It gives the film a sense of motion that student stop-motion rarely has, built from kitchenware.

A six-minute, multi-scene film was not an obvious yes. The faculty warned that the brief wanted five to six minutes and advised keeping it simple: one camera angle, fewer scenes. The students pushed back and asked to try. Mahesh Ahire backed the team and their story. He told Raghav it could be done, and the group got permission to work in the hostel beyond the 9-to-5 timetable in exchange for finishing the film.

There was a catch they had not hit yet. In the foundation year, before software training began, the students did not know animation tools, so the faculty animated the storyboard themselves to show the group the timing and how long each scene would run. And the production ran straight through real life. Satyam was hospitalized mid-shoot with a stomach infection and a blood clot, and kept making puppets from the hospital, telling the staff who asked that he makes films and this was his project.

Room No. 416 was nominated at national and international festivals, among them 24FPS, the festival run with MAAC, and it won twice: Best Animation at the Cut-OK Film Festival, held at D. Y. Patil, and Best Sound Design at the ImagiNation International Student Film Festival. Raghav handled that sound himself, editing in Premiere Pro and drawing on PID’s sixth-floor Sound Studio and copyright-free libraries.

The recognition landed harder because of who it happened to. Raghav describes himself as an average student who had never won anything outside the university. Satyam nearly left PID after the foundation year, convinced it was wasted, and stayed because of what the film taught him about reading and making stories. Both set out to make something for festivals rather than for a grade, and both now talk about what comes next: more films, and studios and schools of their own.

Room No. 416 was made by seven students. Its credits:

SOURCE AND CONTEXT.  Based on two interviews about Room No. 416, with director Raghav Sharma and animator Satyam Tiwari. The two accounts differ on some plot details (the child’s specific disability and the ghost character’s backstory) and on the exact award count; this article keeps to what both support and to the film’s own credits, and uses the two confirmed wins. Confirm the precise plot and award record against the film before publishing. LinkedIn profiles are linked with tracking parameters removed.

Watch Room No. 416 on YouTube: 

Animation, VFX and design programmes at Parul Institute of Design:

• Raghav Sharma Writer and director; B.Sc Animation and VFX, PID
• Satyam Tiwari Animator and puppet maker; B.Sc Animation and Graphics, PID
• Mahesh Ahire Faculty, Parul Institute of Design
• Parul Institute of Design Design institute of Parul University