Picasso Animation College, Lucknow

THERE was this family which adopted a mouse as their second son, and the mouse was good friends with them all much to the consternation of the family cat… Remember the movie `Stuart Little’, wherein the protagonist, a little mouse Stuart Little, enacts all the human qualities. Credit for all this goes to the animation team. Welcome to the world of film animation – a world where reality meets imagination, where dinosaurs walk across silver screens. This is a world of special effects, unbelievable graphics and exotic technologies that mesh and converge to create unbelievable real and virtual experiences. It’s a world that beckons creative minds to unleash their power; and it’s calling you!
The word animation is derived from a Latin word anima, meaning soul i.e. when life breathes into characters. Then who can forget Walt Disney for the creation of his cartoons especially the Mickey Mouse! In the present sense Animation means linking the series of drawings and simulating their movements together. It is a rapid display of 2D or 3D images to create an illusion of motion. It is an art form in which inanimate objects are brought into life by sequencing the drawn images. In other words animation is making of movies, games or cartoons by moving the drawings or models of animals or people with the help of computers or other electronic means. Animation is emerging a special form of media now days. Animation is growing into a multi-billion dollar industry generating a great scope of employment.
The Indian animation market, fairly “static” until a few years ago, is suddenly waking up to a host of global opportunities that promise a lot of “action” for the country’s leading design specialists. North American film and television programme producers (that boast worldwide networks) are finding it viable to sub- contract animation production activities to independent studios overseas. The demand for animation production services from international animation studios is thus spurred in large part due to India’s lower costs of animation production and technical manpower to meet 2-D and 3-D animation requirements.
Career Prospects
Indian animation industry though a late starter is on the threshold of a boom period and so has a great career potential. India has great mythological stories and characters, good artists and technicians. Numerous job opportunities are available in India as well as abroad in the exciting field of animation. It opens the door to film industries such as Hollywood, which is the world of special effects and imagery for films. Specialized computer knowledge and skills are essential for various jobs in the field of animation. It is a booming industry with wide job openings and one can work on full length animation movies or any other related fields like television, advertising industry etc. An Animated feature film, which offers considerable employment prospects, is a combined talented effort of a wide variety of artists.
Remuneration
The training institutes help the candidates in their placements. After finishing the in-house training in some leading animation production studio, you can be a junior animator and can start earning between Rs.12000 to Rs.14000. A senior animator with an experience of 3 to 5 years can take home a sum of Rs.25000 to Rs.35000. But if you have a portfolio of some good and outstanding animation work you would even be able to earn more than Rs 50000 to Rs 60000.

The Foundry has entered into a unique relationship with Walt Disney Animation Studios to advance 3D texture painting techniques announced Bill Collis, CEO, The Foundry. In addition to incorporating elements of Disney‘s internally developed Paint 3D technology into Mari, Walt Disney Animation Studios‘ technology group will participate in a Mari steering committee, contributing to the future direction of the software.

Paint 3D offers some of the industry‘s most advanced aspects of paint and texture creation technology. Paint 3D is also the original development ground and authoring tool for Ptex, Disney‘s revolutionary open source texture mapping system that eliminates the need for UV mapping and efficiently stores hundreds of thousands of images in a single file. This represents the first time Walt Disney Animation Studios has commercially licensed its proprietary animation software to an outside company.

“The technology group at Walt Disney Animation Studios is proud to have created some of the most innovative software in the industry and we‘re thrilled to be contributing technology to The Foundry to make these next generation tools available to everyone,” said Dan Candela, director of technology at Walt Disney Animation Studios. “We‘re looking forward to expanding our relationship with The Foundry, using their technology to help create 3D paint and texture tools that leverage the best of our mutual technologies.”

“The addition of Mari to the product portfolio earlier this year has launched us into a new market,” said Collis. “This agreement with Walt Disney Animation Studios provides access to their Paint 3D technology with its industry-proven toolset, powerful procedural paint and definitive Ptex paint infrastructure. It‘s a natural complement to Mari and we‘re very excited about producing new solutions.”

Paint 3D was first used on Disney‘s 2005 animated feature, Chicken Little, and was widely deployed on Meet the Robinsons (2007), Bolt (2008), and all subsequent animated projects including the upcoming November release, Tangled. Disney first used Ptex on the production of its animated short, Glago‘s Guest, in late 2007, and went on to present it publicly for the first time at the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) in June 2008. I (I Its enthusiastic reception was followed in January 2010 by an announcement of the availability of the Ptex technology as open source.

Mari – technology originally developed at Weta Digital – is a 3D texture painting application. The technology was driven by the need to handle complex, high-resolution textures on 3D models. Mari was designed as a full 3D paint tool with responsiveness and feature set that exceeds the best dedicated 2D paint systems. Mari is extremely scalable, coping easily with extremes level of detail – literally, thousands of textures – quickly and elegantly.

Anumeha Srivastava

Assistant Academic Counselor

Internationally movies, music and gaming are the 3 pillars of mass entertainment but we can be rightful in saying that gaming is still in its infancy right now and it is too early to call it the 3rd pillar in the Indian entertainment industry. To throw light on the topic were some seasoned professionals from the gaming industry namely Jaspreet Bindra – Regional Director – Entertainment and devices, Microsoft who was moderating the session along with the legendary Ernest Adams, Game designer consultant , lecturer and an industry veteran who has been in the industry for the past 21 years. Vishal Gondal, Founder and CEO of Indiagames, Arun Mehra, COO Zapak Digital Entertainment Limited, Siddharth Roy, Gaming head – Hungama Digital, Neeraj Bharadwaj – MD Accel India growth and Navdeep Narula from Reliance.

Jaspreet started off with a short video of project Natal. Microsoft‘s next generation controller less console set to launch in November 2010.”The only experience you need is life experience” it said at the end of the video. The video showed how the introduction of such a console would bind the whole family together and expand the gaming ecosystem which was previously occupied by hardcore gamers.

Ernest Adams continued proceedings with his views on the Indian gaming industry as he said, “I am here to advice and consult game developers across India. Some day someone is going make it big in India and I would like to be a part of it. I recognized that there are certain challenges that developers face while making localized games. The question here is, can you make gaming the 3rd pillar within the limited boundaries that Indian developers have? Firstly you have to make gaming acceptable for the general mass. Games are still not accepted as we might like as the industry needs to be ready for ‘moral panic‘. Parents in India do not encourage their kids to heavily indulge in gaming which is holding back the progress to some extent. If gaming needs to be the 3rd pillar the game industry has to compete with film ,TV and Cricket for that matter. I came to know today that releasing a movie during cricket season is not advisable. So these are the main hurdles that need to be overcome.”

Indiagames has definitely shared a major chunk of game development on mobiles and the online space as well. If cricket sells in India, Indiagames has capitalized on this fact by making cricket games. Indiagames has developed about 10 cricket games for the mobile and have had over 10 million paid downloads at an average revenue of INR 50 per game including the share of service providers. Vishal started of f by showing a small clip of the new DLF IPL game which is available on mobile and the browser and it has connectivity with face book. “I believe in the next 3 years everyone will talk about gaming. As I am working in the gaming industry I have noticed that you have to change your business plan every year because there is something that comes and disrupts your plan every time you get into the flow. The current key thing in games is face book. Everyone is on face book and it has got everyone gaming form kids to grandmothers. This has made us re-look at our business. I believe the next big thing is that the model on mobile is going free. ‘Free is the new premium‘. Make the game free and motivate people to spend within the game with the micro transaction models. Make gamers compete with their facebook friends. It‘s the completion that keeps games alive.” Vishal said.

Zapak has hugely made the online gaming space noticeable with the extensive advertising that they did after their launch and since then they have entered the major value chains in the gaming industry. Zapak has set up gameplexes over 40 cities all over India and are making kids spend INR 2000 per month at these gameplexes. Arun also showed a small clip related to various world events and how there are games everywhere eg. (Tiger Woods surrounded by girls and being tagged as multiplayer just couldn‘t be overlooked). “Zapak made you realize that there is a gamer in you. 7 million gamers are playing on Zapak and over 2 million youths participate in gaming tournaments. Youth passions have changed, kids all over are now consuming gaming as we used to consume music. If you look at some huge brands like Axe and Pepsi, they have started using gaming as a advertising model. So we need to be experimenting.” said Arun.

Need is the mother of all invention. There is piracy happening but consumption does happen.

Accel India Growth is a global VC and private equity fund. Neeraj Bharadwaj chose to focus on the global gaming space as it is equally essential if we want our local space to grow. “What is happening globally in the gaming market? Globally it has become a mass market and no longer belongs to hardcore gamers. With Wii the casual gamers have increased. Along with that facebook has done a tremendous favor to the gaming industry. Companies like Zynga and Playfish have reached out to the mass market with their games. It is true that the game experience that you get on a console you will never get anywhere else but we surely cannot overlook the achievements of facebook games. 8 of the top 10 facebook apps are games. This is a massive market today, so online gaming has crawled high up on the ladder. In the mobile space as open platforms like Android, Appstore and Ovi, the monopoly that operators had in the market has been broken.
These are all plus points from the industry perspective and this is slowly helping us to move up the ladder where the Indian gaming space is concerned.”

Siddharth Roy heads gaming at Hungama digital, he contributed to the discussion as he said, “Both Vishal and me have large chunks on mobile gaming space. Indian consumers are largely brand driven and thus brands play a very important role. Gaming becomes a very interesting way for brands to interact with their consumers. We have games on Orkut and till date our games have about 100000 gaming consumptions per day. On the mobile space there is extensive gaming as there are across Bollywood movies and sports. If the game design and game play is interesting, the consumer not only stays with you but there will be effective word of mouth and you will see consumption happening. Today the Farmville community is bigger than any other online gaming community. So gaming is out there.”

Navdeep put forward an interesting point of view as he came from the retail space. “We need to be circumspective and go about cautiously as parents are still hesitant to buy games. The 3 major platforms of gaming pc, consoles and mobiles, big daddy being the mobile as there are about 450 million handsets in India alone but in spite of that of our business comes from the console gaming space. We need to involve retail as well. The PC offline gaming business is dying as it is giving way to online PC gaming. Console is where the business is really taking over according to me. After a HDTV the next investment these days is the console and I guess 3D is the big thing now. 3D is something gaming we will be benefiting from the most as 3D really gets you there. That would be possibly a big move to establish gaming as the 3rd pillar of entertainment.”

It does come out that mobile is somewhat a more profitable way to go if we want the presence of gaming to be felt in India. The numbers speak for themselves as 450 million plus mobiles and mobile gaming constituting about 1.8 billion INR of the annual revenue. Consoles are the current dictators as they are constituting a major chunk of the gaming revenue in India with 4.9 billion INR in 2009, but mobile are certainly going to be the next gaming dictator with an expected revenue of 14.3 billion INR by 2014 clearly overtaking consoles. So with the gaming industry in India on its way up and with the revenue coming in, the entire ecosystem will evolve and it is only a matter of time for gaming to become the 3rd pillar of mass entertainment.

Anumeha Srivastava

Assistant Academic Counselor

Picasso Animation College

Lucknow