Animation as a career option has plenty of opportunities

Posted: Monday, Apr 28, 2008 at 2332 hrs IST

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ANIMATION
I have completed my intermediate and have taken Physics Chemistry Maths with computer science. Is there good scope in the animation industry? Please specify some colleges for animation courses.
—Suresh Goel
The three hundred-odd animation companies in India, which currently employ more than 16,000 professionals (including freelancers), are expected to employ 27,000 by 2010, hence, prospects in animation are excellent. Under- graduate programmes in animation design, or related design programmes are offered by the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad (www.nid.edu), Apeejay Institute of Design, New Delhi (www.apeejay.edu), MAEER's Institute of Design, Pune (www.mitid.edu.in), IIT Guwahati (www.iitg.ac.in), Symbiosis Institute of Design (www.symbiosisdesign.ac.in) and IILM School of Design (http://www.iilm.edu/school_design.htm). B Sc Animation & Multimedia-related courses are offered by BIT Mesra (www.bitmesra.ac.in), Karnataka State Open University (www.ksoumysore.com) and Manipal University (www.manipal.edu). Institutions like ZICA(www.zica.org), Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology, Bangalore (www.srishti.ac.in), International College of Animation Arts & Technology (ICAAT) (www.icaat.net), Toonz Animation

Why is it needed?

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The outsourcing industry has attracted plenty of animation and game studios to send work over to India. There is some fantastic work being churned out at the numerous studios around India.

The gaming industry is a relatively new entrant in India. This is largely because the video gaming phenomenon is relatively new to India. Therefore, there is a serious lack of game production professionals who are gamers themselves. This lack of exposure is a major weak point. This is, therefore, the first USP that you have, as a gamer, over most of the game production professionals in India.

Animation requires a familiarity wit the English language. This gives India the advantage for more outsourced work. Most animation studios in training programmes. Besides this, we also have a large pool of low-cost, high-quality software engineers. A number of Indian animation companies have set up hi-tech studios manned by such engineers.

A US-based animator can cost about $ 125 an hour. However, an Indian animator costs $25 an hour. Toonz Animation offers animation at 25 percent to 40 percent lower rates than other Asian studios and much lower than those of American studios. The total cost for making a full-length animated film in America is estimated to be $100 million to $175 million. In India, it can be made for $15 million to $25 million. All these factors points to the fact that the animation-outsourced industry is set to grow.

Rajesh Rao, founder of Dhruva Interactive, India's first development gaming studio addresses the gaming scenario. According to Rao, "With the often quoted statistics of 350 million young Indians between the age of 15 and 35, there is definitely huge potential. I mean, china has a 3.5 billion dollar industry and it just happened in the last 8-9 years. In India too, things are bound to improve, especially with such disposable incomes. It'll be among the top 3-4. People who join now, have an early day entry. They will have experience. By the time the demand grows, the market increases, they will be industry champions. Especially, as the factors tat enable such a thing are coming together: with internet penetration and cheaper computers there would be 20-25 million broadband subscribers just as the mobiles are growing constantly."

The growth story

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IT industry body NASSCOM has projected the Indian animation industry to reach $1.16 billion of revenues by 2012. The industry is currently worth $460 million and is expected to grow at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 27%.

Custom content development is the largest segment as of today, with an estimated industry size of $187.5 million while animation education is slated to be the fastest growing. The report expects the gaming industry in India to reach $1.06 billion of revenues by 2012 from its current $212 million.

"The global animation and gaming industry has been growing at a CAGR of almost 8-10 % and this billion dollar industry has great scope of employment for those who are ready to try their skills in it. This industry has also been fairly recession resistant, if not recession proof and will continue to see demand over the next 3 years." says Tapaas Chakravarti, CEO of DQE.

What are the related paths in this career that you can pursue?

• Programmers
• Artists
• Designers

The main thing is the intrinsic talent. Besides having a Bachelors' in Science, an Engineering in Computer Science with a background in Maths and Physics helps. Main knowledge is important and less stress on tools will do. All these three kind of profiles work together in a team. Talent is the key, experience not as important.

What do you do in your studio?

Vitek Goyal, CEO Pixeltek: We work on 3D graphics and video game development, mainly catering to game developers. We help in outsourcing and streamlining. We are a small team of 12 people. Instead of the whole game, we do a part of it, like character and asset building.

How did you get into this field?

Vitek Goyal: I used to love playing video games. I mean since I was young. Then, I went on to get a degree in Interactive Arts from New York. At that time I was still a layman with no technical know-how. After I returned to India, I started reading articles doing research on game developing. After which I advertised in a paper and this was pretty much the road map of the company.

Why did you choose this career?

Vitek Goyal: We are always racing against crazy deadlines. And within that time to come up with results that are brilliant is quite a high.

With these unique highs come the benefit of seeing tangible results. It's rewarding to see your mention in the credits, to see your product on a shelf. To know that all the hard work you put into it has culminated into something that people would enjoy. This profession also gives you a chance to interact with people from abroad, meet different kind of mindsets, etc. It's worth it.

What are the required skill sets?

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For Animators:

Somil Gupta, Managing Director, Trine Studios: "For this role we look at people who can sketch and paint. On top of this we look for people who have explored art-styles from all over the world. In the past, we have seen that when we ask an artist to create a western-styled character, they just cannot pull it off. This is because they haven't practiced their hand at different design styles and have stuck to what they learnt in art school," points out Somil Gupta, the Managing Director at Trine Studios in Mumbai.

Vinod AS, the National Head of Academics with Toonz Academy says that besides people who can just draw, the animators who have the real advantage are those that have acting skills. That's right. You read that right. Acting. "The animator himself is an actor. We've noticed that the students that are good at mimicry tend to make better animators. They could be very bad artists, but if they can act, they still make excellent animators. Let's say he wants to design a monkey. They the artists should be able to imitate the way a monkey walks and behave to be able to recreate it," he says.

"You just cannot ask the computer to come up with, let's say, a Victorian steampunk spaceship or a psycho-killer alien-robot assassin. you need artists to create this content and since we are rapidly approaching the point, if not surpassed it, where one can almost interchange the experience of watching a film or playing the newest chapter of the Resident Evil franchise. So we offer instructors that have industry experience in how to make a texture for that evil castle or create a walk-cycle for the muscle-bound hero for the latest and newest video game release," says Philip Edward Alexy, professor at Picasso Animation, touching upon animation in video games.

For Game Production:

Vitek Goyal, CEO Pixeltek: Not necessarily a Master of Fine Arts degree. diploma, tutorials are great to have, but it's the interest that you take in it.

Christopher Erhardt, founder Indian School of Gaming points out that candidates should focus on their math and English. The reason for this is that most game programming is math and all the major programming languages currently are in English.

also, strong C/C++ programming at all levels coupled with good knowledge of linear algebra, calculus, written English and some skills at Flash/BREW/Jave in addition to the C++ is needed for game programming. C# is as an emerging language for this space as well.

What is the required mind set?