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The Indian animation and visual effects industries have moved beyond low-end jobs and are poised to touch more than USD 1.5 billion by end-2010. It’s an era of exciting co-productions and big-ticket outsourcing jobs
When Steven Spielberg and Disney’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit hit the theatres in 1988, it brought about a dramatic turnaround in the world of animation and gave the art form a long deserved fillip it required. The effect was seen in India too. “It was the film that inspired cel [2D] animation,” says Nikhil Patil, Creative Head, Computer Graphics (CG) for Commercials, Pixion in Mumbai. Shrirang Sathaye and Suhail Merchant, animation directors at Visual Computing Labs, TATA Elxsi concur. “It was a movie even adults could watch. Nobody had thought of using live action characters with animated ones. Since the ‘70s, Disney had been suffering losses. It was only with Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the late ‘80s that they bounced back. That spawned a lot of interest. Their last hit was Jungle Book, which was in the ‘60s.”
Similarly, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) heralded the dawn of a new era in animation and visual effects (or VFX, as it is called), one that made the world sit up and take notice of the scope and range of animation and visual effects. Patil explains, “All the dinosaurs were 3D models. Some dinosaurs in certain shots were actual live animatronic [using animation with electronic models] ones. They were live puppets. The biggest feat [for the visual effects team] was to create the dinosaurs in their complete glory. If you look at your skin, there’s so much detail – you see your veins, hair, wrinkles – and they have replicated it all for non-existent creatures. The amount of research they did was staggering. They spoke to bio-mechanics [who tell you the way the part of the anatomy will move given the bone structure] and paleontologists.”
The fascination for VFX-laden films was further fuelled by James Cameron’s 2009 mega blockbuster Avatar, which grossed over USD two billion worldwide, out of which it earned a record USD 220 million in India alone. Cameron waited twelve years for proper technology to make the film. Shot in stereoscopic 3D, a new format in which you try to mimic what your eyes see by shooting with two cameras instead of one, has brought in a whole new style of film-making. Cameron brought in a number of visual effects houses for the movie with Weta Digital (New Zealand) as the lead company. India’s Prime Focus also contributed to some of the VFX works. Indian production houses are now in the race for cracking Stereoscopic 3D film-making technique. The film adaptations of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series also attracted production houses and audiences alike. The six films out so far have grossed over USD five billion, worldwide. The movies had different directors and VFX studios, like the Moving Picture Company (UK) and Framestore CFC, working for them.
According to a market report on the Indian animation and gaming industry compiled by the Strategic Management Group, a division of TATA enterprises, the market in India was estimated at USD 500 million in 2009, and is expected to grow at a rate of around 23 per cent annually to reach USD 1161 million by 2013. The group, which has sourced their findings from Nasscom and other industry sources, says that the key drivers are the increase in outsourced content by the overseas players, a segment in which Indians have captured a large share, increasing evolution of more Indian artists and studios, more usage of visual effects in Bollywood and the increasing use of e-learning content.
The industry, the report indicates, has three key segments: animation, visual effects (VFX) and custom content development for e-learning projects and corporate houses. Among these segments, custom content development is the largest, followed by animation entertainment and then entertainment VFX. However, it is the entertainment VFX segment which is expected to grow the fastest. Almost 70 per cent of the revenue comes from work outsourced by overseas clients. Toonz Animation has done 3D animation for features and shows like Finley the Fire Engine, Dragonlance and Panschel. TATA Elxsi’s Visual Computing Labs has worked on for Spider-Man 3. Though the demand for VFX in domestic market is picking up, this trend is expected to continue. Nasscom estimates that the cost of production of a full-length animated movie in India approximates USD 13 to 22 million, whereas it costs anywhere between USD 71 to 106 million to produce the same movie in the US.
The proven capabilities of Indian animation houses, with their track record of on-time delivery and excellent quality of work have brought them on par with other Asian outsourcing hubs. The Indian players are now slowly moving towards the higher end of the animation TV broadcast value chain. The capability of the Indian players is also being increasingly recognised, as is evident from the increasing co-production deals. For example, Hyderabad-based DQ Entertainment, an Emmy award-winning company and one of the leading producers of animation and visual effects (VFX), next-generation console game art and in-game animation, is involved with over 30 global co-production deals with numerous companies like BBC UK, American Greetings Properties of the US, M6 (France) and others. Toonz Animation has a deal with Spectra Animation of Canada to co-produce 52 episodes of a Malayali animated TV series called Paddy’s Pages, while Sanraa Media will co-produce an animated series called The 99 for UK-based Endemol. There is also a three-movie co-production deal between Crest Animation Production and Hollywood film entertainment studio Lionsgate, between Toonz Animation and South American studio, Illusion Studios and a two-movie deal between DQ Entertainment and Paris-based entertainment company, MoonScoop.
The Tentative Beginnings: Animation, to describe it in the simplest of terms, is a process under which different drawings of imagined action [called frames] are recorded in such a way that they offer an illusion of motion when shown at a predetermined rate. Another way to describe it is a time sequencing of frames to create a simulation of several continuous movements.
Since the 1950s, Indian animation artists had been working on traditional cel animation or 2D animation. Claire Weeks, an animator from Disney was flown down by the Indian government to impart training. Weeks helped set up the Cartoons Films Unit of the Films Division, incorporated under the aegis of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1956. Weeks trained a batch of 10 to 12 artists in animation production techniques. Under his guidance, the artists produced an animated film, Banyan Deer. Some of these artists included Ram Mohan, considered a pioneer in the Indian animation industry, and Bhimsen Gokhale.
Thereafter, many animation artists branched out and went their separate ways. Animation continued to be done, but on a small scale. Mohan says, “We were mostly doing Planned Publicity films – short animated movies that catered to the rural population and they were about issues like family planning, sanitation, etc.” Outsourcing, if it was at all happening, was in pockets of very low volume. “Generally, when you’re animating in 2D, you do 10 frames per intervals. The in-between used to be done here,” explains Patil. 2D animation requires a lot of hand-drawing, and the Asian market had enough cheap labour to do this kind of detailed work. Says Ashish Kulkarni, CEO of Big Animation, “If it was a CG production, it was outsourced to countries like India and Canada; if it was 2D it was outsourced to Taiwan, the Philippines and such, because people of these countries are naturally good at drawing. And if it was post-production work, it was outsourced to Ireland because they have high-end sound scores and all.”
The competition from the South East Asian countries eventually became one of the reasons Indian studios shifted to 3D Animation. Mohan says, “It was just not that the people of Asian countries had hand skills. 2D animation involves long man hours and thousands of drawings. They had the work culture for it. Indian animators didn’t take too well to such work.” Work in 2D animation continued through the ‘80s, for commercials primarily but the volume of work was still low-scale. Yet, small but significant changes were taking place. Chief among them, Mohan claims, was the shift from hand-drawn work to digitisation where you get the output on beta graphics, instead of the hand-drawings being shot frame by frame on 35mm film with a Rostrum camera. Then, as Merchant puts it, “The ad industry boomed. Television, particularly colour TV came in.” Sathaye adds that, “Technology was also growing. Computers spawned a new growth. People who were not good with sketching could try their hand at the technical aspect of animation.” All of this gave a marked impetus to the industry. One of the very first ads, according to Patil, that captured people’s imagination was the 1990 Kawasaki Bajaj ad by Shyam Ramanna, a digital animator, film-maker and founder of Digital Asia Concept Limited, a production house. The ad showed a bike transforming into a cheetah, the symbol of speed and power. That ad, in his opinion, introduced India to the fascinating world of animation and inspired several animation artists.
Suddenly, the animation industry took a big leap as CG was used in more ads. The quality of work was better and the quantity too had seen a marked increase. Mohan, Sathaye and Merchant all concur that till the ‘80s, animation studios were small, boutique studios where one person would multi-task. Merchant says, “Even the process was simpler. You do your storyboard, your character design, then your layouts, your background and your animation, it goes into the computer, you composite it and colour it. Animation has some stages in between. There were five to six stages and a person would multi-task.” Now, of course, each job and step is done by a specialist. “A person who does rigging will only do rigging; a person who does furs will only do that. These minute stages go on till the end. So, it has become very fragmented and detailed,” says Sathaye.
The success of the IT industry also spurred investors to look at animation and animation software. This, in turn, entailed more outsourcing work for the artists, says Mohan. When it comes to animation in the ad industry, however, Patil says that “specialisation does not help so much in making CG for commercials. One day you’re making an animation of a chocolate being wrapped, the next day you’re making a car explode, and after that you’re doing an orange jumping around. In our team, more or less everybody is a generalist; they can do everything. There are artists who love to do one particular thing but that does not mean they don’t know how to do anything else”.
According to experts, India has drawn the model of specialisation from big Hollywood studios. “Initially we used to have generalists working on even features here. Then we realised that for a project on the scale of a feature film, which is going to take a minimum of six months to complete, specialisation works better there. You can actually set up a pipeline - start from your pre-production to post-production, the modelling, the lighting, the texturing – all of it. For commercials, specialisation still doesn’t work. Sometimes one person can take care of the whole work, depending upon the complexity of the work. But there have been commercials where we’ve had 30 people working on the same job.”
