India’s Digital Dreams

N Chandra Mohan

Thanks to India’s software prowess, Hollywood has already begun sourcing creativity from the country in a big way. The advance of digital technologies has radically redefined the way animation and live-action movies are made, gradually blurring the distinction between the two genres in the 21st century. The marriage of movies and the computer has resulted in a division of labour in which film- making takes place on the sets with actors and camera crew while a computer graphics contingent often sits elsewhere, including places like India of late and Asia, to add digital effects to the movie.

This computer graphics contingent – comprising digital compositors, rotoscope artists, animation technicians and suchlike – often has little or no contact with those on the sets. “They work from cartoon strips, hunched over computers in scattered cubicles. They are usually hired not by the director, the producers, or the studio but by a subcontractor who has usually submitted the lowest bid for a particular digital animation shot…. Cost, not consistency, tends to be the criterion in doling out this work”, according to Edward Jay Epstein’s insightful industry expose The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood.

A high point of sorts of India’s growing stature as a preferred outsourcing location for such activity was the making of The Chronicles of Narnia that incorporated the creativity of 50 Indians based in Mumbai. This film, which narrowly missed getting the best visual effects award at last years’ Academy Awards, had a major input from the Indian arm of Rhythm and Hues, the Hollywood visual effects studio, that clinched the $40 million subcontract for making animated characters like centaurs for Narnia. This is a creative job of ‘compositing’, involving merging of layers of images generated by the computer.

Economics clearly is the driver of this process. When $40,000 a year jobs in the US can be done for $2,700 a year in India or the fact that the cost of producing a half-an-hour animated programme in the US is $2,50,000 to $ 4,00,000 when compared to $60,000 in India, the differentials are obviously attractive enough for Hollywood studios like Walt Disney Pictures, Time Warner's Cartoon Network Enterprises, Sony Pictures Entertainment, among others, to outsource work to India’s inexpensive but top quality computer programmers and animators or set up local operations in the country.

To be sure, the bulk of animation outsourcing to India still involves low-end, labour-intensive jobs like filling in the colours on each frame or airbrushing images and so on. But times are a-changing with the rapidly growing use of India’s software prowess in relatively high-end computer animation like in Garfield in which an animated cat is superimposed on a real-life shot. Industry watchers, however, feel that the country is steadily acquiring the capability to make such films independently; that the process of moving up the value chain – as in the rest of India’s software industry – has truly begun.

Co-production agreements with major Hollywood studios are steadily on the rise as India’s animation industry gains confidence to partner in making full-length animation films. Walt Disney thus has partnered with an Indian studio, Yashraj Films, to make an animated film Roadside Romeo. First Serve Toonz, a joint venture between Toonz Animation India, one of India’s biggest animation studios, and London-based First Serve International, has recently inked a deal with BBC for a 26-episode animation series, based on the iconic character, Wolverine, which has worldwide appeal.

A bunch of start-up ventures are on the anvil that bid fair to take India into the big league of global animation. For instance, Compact Disc India Ltd (CDI), a big 3D animation film outsourcing company, plans to list its newly incorporated company MediaOne Ventures Limited on the London Stock Exchange. This company has been launched to make live-action and animation films, either wholly or jointly produced with Hollywood. CDI has already signed a $20.15 million deal to co- produce an animated film Goaaal! with Motion Pixel Corporation, a Los Angeles- based film production house.

Adlabs Animation, which started up in 2006, also has announced major plans to foray internationally. It is making a film Sultan The Warrior, starring Tamil Nadu’s superstar Rajnikanth, who has a huge cult following in Japan. “International animation is where the action is. We intend to co-finance and finance the development of original animated content and work together with animation studios abroad”, says Sidhartha Jain, who took over Adlabs Animation after serving a stint with Hyperion Pictures and being involved with the development of two animation projects, Bollywood High and The Oz Kids.

A big factor behind the domestic industry’s growing confidence is the successful launch of films with local themes like Hanuman in 2005 and others like Little Krishna, Ramayan, Pandavas, Legend of Buddha, Ali Baba and Son of Ali Baba. Action is truly hotting up as 71 animation films, besides a handful of TV serials, have been announced in the past 12 months. There are 300 small, medium and big animation companies employing over 16,500 people. The animation industry in India is worth $354 million and is expected to grow 25% every year to reach $869 million by 2010, according to NASSCOM.

NASSCOM’s numbers are derived from estimates of the total global opportunity in animation that is pegged at $59 billion in 2006. Around 40-45% of this is the cost of development that indicates the global market for animated content, which is $25 billion to $26 billion. India’s growing market share is then used to derive the estimate of $354 million. An independent trade survey conducted recently, however, estimated India’s animation industry at $550 million and is expected to grow faster at 30% annually in the next couple of years and reach a level of $1.5 billion by 2010.

India has produced animation sporadically for 92 years -- the father of Indian cinema, Dhumdiraj Govind Phalke, produced the animated film Agkadyanchi Mouj (Matchsticks' Fun) in 1915 -- and “steadily for more than half that time, facts are generally buried beneath the hoopla given the popular and gargantuan feature film industry”, according to Dr John Lent who has written on comic art. But its relative obscurity is fast changing in recent times with the entry of foreign animation houses, proliferating TV channels, boom in telecom and the gaming industry, all of which needs lot of animation content.

Demographics, however, has a bigger role to play in this regard. While the outsourcing opportunity, no doubt, has been a catalyzing force, both Hollywood and the local industry are also seized of the fact that the future of the world’s entertainment industry lies at home. Over half of India’s population is below 20 years of age. There is also a higher concentration of people between 15 to 35 years of age who are important for animation and the entertainment business in general. Such a huge domestic market is a big advantage to spur the development of a top-quality animation industry.

“Ten years from now, Spiderman may be swinging from the skyscrapers of Shanghai, instead of New York, and the face behind that mask may even be Chinese”, argued India’s leading international film-maker, Shekhar Kapur. With such favourable demographics, that mask may very well be Indian with big animation houses being involved in the making of later editions of Spiderman! Is it therefore any surprise that Hollywood simply cannot anymore ignore the imperative of having a presence in India, besides enjoying savings of 50% plus on their animation production expenses.

The bad news is that this very happening industry is terribly short of trained talent to sustain its upward dynamic. Couple of years ago, NASSCOM had forecast that India would need more than 300,000 skilled animators in content studios alone. But recently, it indicated that the workforce would grow only modestly from 16,500 at present to only 26,000 by 2010. If true, this portends a massive demand-supply gap. India also currently needs at least 10,000 professional animators of international standards if it wants to survive the competition from Asian rivals such as the Philippines, Korea and Taiwan.

Unless this skill shortage is addressed on a war footing, India’s advantages in the outsourcing business in animation might well prove transient. Hollywood studios will move elsewhere where they can mine cheaper pools of skilled labour. To be sure, most of the big animation studios in India have started institutes to train skilled personnel in this business. A number of training institutes have come up in smaller towns. Central universities like Jamia Millia Islamia have also recently introduced courses in animation.

Although India still has an edge on the cost factor, the serious shortage of skills might well force the fast growing domestic industry to paradoxically engage in reverse outsourcing! Reports thus are surfacing of plans of some big animation studios to get some parts of the production done in the Philippines and Malaysia. Economics again is driving this process as the country seeks a place in the global sun with its digital prowess in making animation and live-action movies.