Studio Eeksaurus animates sheep's wool with itself — 'Desi Oon' wins ADFEST Grande

India has the world's third-largest sheep population, yet its wool industry runs mostly on imports: indigenous wool, spun by shepherds across the Deccan plateau for generations, is routinely thrown away as waste while synthetic and foreign alternatives fill the shelves. Centre for Pastoralism, a non-profit working to keep pastoralist life alive, commissioned a film to make that decline visible.

What Studio Eeksaurus delivered was neither a documentary nor a fundraising appeal but a six-minute stop-motion film in which the wool itself narrates — remembering when it was precious, noticing how quietly it has been set aside. The defining choice: the film was animated with real Deccani wool sourced from the very shepherds it advocates for, so the audience watches the material act out its own history. No pipeline existed; the team invented felting, layering and lighting methods from scratch and trained student animators with no stop-motion experience on the job.

The score avoided mood-setting strings and instead used the folk music of the Deccani shepherds themselves — traditional song structures, native singing styles and rare live folk instruments — so the film sounds like home to the community it was made for. The result swept the ADFEST 2026 Film Craft Lotus: a Grande, two Golds and a Bronze, with the jury highlighting that every craft layer — wool animated with wool, music built from the community's own songs — points at the same argument.