What’s afflicting the animation training industry

Rajneesh De/Mumbai

Bollywood blockbusters like Lagaan, Mohabbatein, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and Mission Kashmir offered much more to the audience than the histrionics of stars like Aamir, Shahrukh, Hrithik and the Big B. All these movies belong to a genre which is increasingly placing more importance on stunning visuals through computer-generated special effects. A definite conclusion that Indian audiences do not need to look at only Matrix, Titanic, Shrek and other Hollywood productions to enjoy the dazzling world of animation and special effects. Not only the desi products, even the techno-wizardry of Hollywood is not generated only out of American digital dream factories. In most cases these are developed out of studios in India, the new mecca for the $30 billion animation and special effects industry, broadly coming under the purview of digital content development.

The fastest growing segment within the IT-enabled services market, digital content development is estimated to have raked in revenues worth Rs 1,600 crore in 2001, employing over 27,000 people countrywide. With a growth rate of nearly 100 percent over the 1999-00 revenues of Rs 850 crore, Nasscom concludes that computer graphics, character animation and data digitisation is dominating the Rs 4,100 crore Indian IT-enabled services industry. The numbers that Nasscom is predicting are even more startling. Its forecast: by 2004, the digital content industry would reach a size of Rs 5,000 crore which would further zoom to Rs 10,000 crore in 2008 employing over 100,000 people. It further pegs the revenue/employee in this sector at $15,000 and average offshore salary at $7,000 by 2008.

It is easy to understand the reasons behind Nasscom’s optimism. Globally the animation and computer graphics sector is billed to reach $50 billion by 2005. Services worth $300 million are already outsourced to India and other markets in South-East Asia by major Hollywood studios because of the cost advantage. Feels Pankaj Khandpur, creative director, Western Outdoor, one of the leading Indian studios, “If a 20-minute special effects animation sequence costs about $ 75,000 in India, studios in the US charge $150,000. With its talent pool and competitive pricing, India is all set to grab the lion’s share of this growing pie.”

Agrees Rajesh Turakhia, vice president, Maya Entertainment, another leading studio founded by avant-garde Bollywood director Ketan Mehta, “Digital film making is the way to go. As hardware prices drop, computer-generated scenes will cost far less than films shot on location.”

Filmmaking is but one area within the computer graphics and animation field. The industry also occupies itself with content development for video and TV programmes, commercial advertising, corporate presentations and films, gaming consoles, interactive CD and DVD presentations and visualisation, which include everything from architectural walkthroughs to forensic analyses.

Entertainment applications, however, top the list as demand for services in this area continues to grow, even in the middle of a downturn. Industry research source Digital MediaNet pegs the share of film and broadcast at 42 percent of the professional animation tools market. Game development ranks second at 31 percent while visualisation and Web design account for 15 percent.

With such phenomenal growth predicted in the near future, the most important question today is whether we have the requisite manpower with the relevant skill sets? Since the answer is undoubtedly negative, the next question is, do we have proper training facilities to groom this manpower? Till now, unfortunately, the answer to this too was either none or almost minimal, though the year 2001 saw things slowly starting to change. According to Ram Mohan, president, UTV Toons, and one of the pioneers of animation in India, “The dearth of professional institutions in India that provide technical training in quality animation, both classical and digital, has caused a severe shortage of animators with the required skill levels. Animation training programs, therefore, have a very important role to play in the growth of this industry.”

One of the biggest players in this multimedia training arena is definitely Arena, a brand of the computer training major Aptech. Currently contributing about 12-13 percent of Aptech revenues, Arena is set to expand to over 40 countries in the next 12-18 months. It offers training in areas like multimedia, animation and Web engineering for job opportunities in areas like printing, fashion, film and television.

Arena has alliances with Macromedia and Apple and also academic partnerships with Southern Cross University of Australia and Farleigh Dickenson University of US. According to Sudhir Mathur, head, Arena Multimedia, “Our flagship programme is the six-semester Triple Certificate where respective semesters focus on graphics, special effects and authoring, animation, website designing, back end Web technology and finally media convergence.”

In addition, to meet this huge demand for animators Arena has also set up the Arena Animation Academy in Mumbai, Kolkata and Hyderabad with more than 50 centres planned to come up by April 2002. All these academies are Authorised Training Centres for Discreet, the market leader with state-of-the art animation applications like Combustion, Edit and Unferno, vital for post-production work like compositing and editing. These academies also offer specialisation in Maya for 3D Animation, as well as Animo and US Animation for 2D Animation. Alliances are also in place with Alias Wavefront, Toon Boom and Cambridge Animation. The courses on offer are on classical and cel animation, Maya, US animation, Animo, audio-video editing and special effects. The average duration is around a year, and the average cost is around Rs 30,000.

Apart from Arena, the last two years have seen a host of other institutes coming up with multimedia training providing facilities. Pentamedia Graphics in Chennai has been providing a three-month residential training programme which used to have several takers till only a few months back, before the company was besieged by its own problems. Mumbai-based Zee Interactive Learning System (ZILS), The Workstation from Tasa, Edit and Image are some of the other leading training institutes. Even C-DAC offers an animation training course in Mumbai and Pune. With Mumbai housing so many of the studios, it is perhaps not surprising that so many of these institutes are based out of the city. Some foreign trainers have also got involved. Vancouver-based VFS, which trains 3,000 animators annually, has entered into a multi million dollar deal with Modi Enterprises (KK Modi Group) to offer courses for 400-700 students in classical animation, 3D and new media.

Many production houses have spawned off their in-house training facilities into a separate training business offering course packages for 200-300 animators. Apart from creating a separate stream of revenue, this also ensures them a captive pool of talent. One such example was Ketan Mehta’s Maya, starting the Maya Academy of Advanced Cinematics (MAAC) which is training around 300 people in over five cities across the country. Bangalore-based Compudyne Winfosystems, Mumbai-based The FX Factory and Crest Communications are some other production houses that have jumped into this training bandwagon.

With so many training facilities the future looks rosy, but GV Babu, COO, Pentamedia Graphics, still feels that unless skill sets are enhanced India might still lose out to competitors like Philippines, South Korea and China. And if competition from these countries increases in 2002, the margins for outsourced work may come under pressure. The advantage is that they have decades of experience in the area of traditional 2D animation with graphics and animation long being a compulsory part of their school curriculum. And graduating from 2D animation to 3D animation is only a matter of learning a computer software package. China already has a vibrant 2D and 3D animation production industry catering to local demand.

The moot question remains why with so many training institutes India is still facing a dearth of skilled manpower. It is the old story of private computer training institutes with their problems like quality of faculty, lack of proper placement facilities and others. Khandpur feels that often these training institutes teach wrong notions and the studios then have to spend a lot of time and energy to re-train the animators. Relates one student of one of the leading training institutes in Kolkata, “One morning, we discovered that the security guard in our centre starting to take our classes by virtue of his sitting with us everyday.” Even MAAC has yet to find proper placement facilities for most of its students in the initial batches. This has therefore led them not to promise guaranteed placement facilities for students in future. In the entire light what comes out clear is that unless training houses do not pull up their socks, it might be present imperfect and future bleak for the Indian animation industry despite its undoubted promise.