Indian animation sector aims $1.7 billion growth

The Indian animation industry will grow at a compounded annual rate of 30 percent to reach a market size of $1.7 billion by 2012 and add over three lakh skilled animators, an industry lobby said Monday.With over 1.5 lakh skilled animators, it is currently a $1 billion industry. According to a study conducted by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the domestic animation industry will undertake all its production activities within India instead of spending its funds in US, Canada, Malaysia and the Phillippines for making advanced animated movies.It showed India would need skilled professionals like creative animators, conceptualiser, visualiser, 3D modellers, character designer and digital effect artists to handle multimedia softwares like 3D studio Max, Maya and Tictactoon.The study urged the government to help the industry by giving them adequate funding, guidance on manpower development and recognition of the animation courses.According to Assocham, the industry in foreign countries are growing at a high rate because of the special policies and initiaves of the governments.

By recognizing animation courses, students and youths will conveniently get the bank loans which is missing at present, it added.Assocham also suggested to the government that the corporates that intend to set up the suggested parks should be given a minimum of 10 years tax holidays with concessional rates for land allocations equipped with advanced technology to remove the competitive threats from the other countries.However, the chamber expressed concerns that the growth might be restricted due to the shortage of manpower and specialized training institutes, lack of government funding, hi-tech studios and tax incentives.The study also revealed that a huge requirement would be created in India in the field like creative animators, conceptualiser, visualiser, 3D modelers, character designer and digital effect artists to handle multimedia software like 3D studio Max, Maya and Tictactoon.The study also added that by recognizing animation courses, students and youths will conveniently get the bank loans which is still missing in 2010.

First 5 Minutes of ‘Megamind’

Indian Artists‘ massive VFX collabration with studios & artists worldwide for ‘Endhiran - The Robot‘

About 10 studios and a number of freelance artists from across the world have collaborated with Chennai based visual effects studio Indian Artists Computer Graphics Pvt. Ltd for the Rajinikanth starrer VFX magnum opus ‘Endhiran - The Robot‘ that released on October 1st, 2010 all over India. V. Srinivas M Mohan had donned the dual role of being the VFX Supervisor for the entire film supervising the work of the other studios involved and also as the VFX Head at Indian Artists, being on the main studios that did about 80% of the work.LA based Legacy Effects formerly known as Stan Winston Studio that has earlier worked on movies like ‘Terminator‘ and ‘Jurassic Park‘ has worked on the animatronics for the movie. Hong Kong based studios namely Kinomotive Studios and Menfond Electronics & Arts have attended to the supervision of their respective VFX work. Other Indian studios that were involved in the project were Hyderabad based Firefly Studios; Chennai based VenSat, Pixion, EFX Prasad Studios, Ocher Studios, Mayans Creatives and Oysterr Studios. Also some freelancers from London, Canada, Iran, Germany, France and Hong Kong were part of the project.The movie has about 2000 VFX shots that add up to around 60 scenes in the film. The majority of the VFX work has been handled by Chennai based studio Indian Artists under VFX supervisor V. Srinivas M Mohan and Frankie Chung who has worked on films like ‘Kung Fu Hustle‘ and Eddy Wong were the additional VFX Supervisors from Hong Kong studios Kinomotive studios and Menfond Electronics & Arts respectively.The trilingual movie in Tamil, Hindi and Telugu with English subtitles produced by Kalanidhi Maran and directed by Shankar has Rajinikanth and Aishwarya Rai in the lead roles. It‘s a sci-fi movie in which Rajinikanth plays a dual role of a scientist and a robot. The scientist Dr. Vaseegaran creates a robot with artificial intelligence and names it as Chitti, the film goes on to show how Chitti mingles with society.The animatronics was used in about 22 scenes in total for the movie. All the resources and technology available at Stan Winston Studio were used for the same including puppets and mannequins. About 40 mannequins of The Robot Ranjinikanth were got from Stan Winston Studio for the scenes involving number of robots.

The team has used some unique technology such as the Doom Light stage scanning for detail high resolution CGI face. Also the Indian Artists have developed a new proprietary skin shader plugin with the help of Jupiter Jazz, the developers of shake. The shader is open source and the code for it is available at https://code.google.com/p/jupiterskin/.

Srinivas shared "We have used lots of techniques which we haven‘t used before due to budget constraints such as the pre visualization which were much appreciated and welcomed by studios in the Hollywood when we approached them for their services. The concepts were all wonderful and they had liked the approach towards the film that we had. Thanks to Director Shankar sir for fresh and wild ideas with emotional sc-fi script.Pixion Chennai has worked on the complete title sequence and the scenes where in the Robot Chitti uses his hand as a gun. They also contributed around 300 shots in throughout the film. EFX Prasad has worked on the ‘Arima arima‘ song sequence, while Ocher studios worked on the animation sequence where in the antagonist Dr. Bora explains the capabilities of the robots he is creating to the dealers, Mayans Creatives worked on the baby delivery sequence and Oysterr had worked on a shot.