ANIMATION - AN UPCOMING CAREER OPTION

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The film world is being overrun by cartoon characters —from Toy Story to A Bug’s Life to Shark Tales. Not content with children’s films, animation has firmly established itself in mainstream cinema, advertising, television and the gaming industry.

On one end of the spectrum are the fully animated features such as the blockbuster 7776 Incredibles or Shrek (1 & 2) Lion King, and Finding Nemo, while even regular films like Titanic, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings and Harry potter series extensively rely on digital photography and animation to bring alive breath-taking environment, monsters and fight sequences. And the there is Final Fantasy whose entire cast is computer generated giving birth to a new term - “synthespians” or digital actors!

The Indian animation industry is fast catching up - Pandavas-The Five Warriors, Ramayana-The Legend of Prince Ram, Sindbad, Hum Turn, Bhagrnati and Hanuman have captured the fancy of US studios and won prestigious awards.

Employment Opportunities
Although the animation industry in India is still in its infancy. It is fast emerging as a mega base for outsourcing animation and digital special effects production for Hollywood blockbusters and global studios such as Disney Pictures, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, John Carey, UK; Rainbow, Italy and Neptuno, Spain besides catering to the local market.

The cost for making a full-length animated film in America is $100 - $175 million while it costs not more than $15 - $25 million in India which is leveraging this cost advantage to divert business from Canada and SE Asian countries.

Internationally the animation industry can be categorised into two: Outsourcing and Original content. A majority of Indian companies are servicing contracts for the West and earn their bread and butter from low-end jobs like ‘in-betweening’ and ‘key framing’. The magic words for opening the doors to success are ownership of the Intellectual Property Rights of the animated feature. All outsourcing companies in India will eventually need to consider a paradigm shift and move over to creating original content.

While there are 10,000-odd animators in the country presently, there is a demand for at least 50,000. About 1000-1,500 animators are churned out every year but animation studios feel that they need additional training to match international quality benchmarks.

Besides film and television, the potential of this medium extends to diverse fields ranging from education to orthopaedics, aeronautics, robotics, reverse engineering, digitizing, fashion and research. While high-end gaming technology is emerging as a hot field globally, animation is touted to be the next big thing on the Internet as soon as the bandwidth constraints are resolved.
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