Pune has a stake in Indian animation industry's success

PUNE: The next time you watch a Hollywood special-effect movie and marvel at the talent the West has, think again. The man behind the on-screen
spectacle could well be someone sitting in a studio in Pune.

The Indian animation and visual effects (VFX) industry now has clients beyond Hollywood as projects come pouring in from countries like China as well. Pune has a major stake in VFX's success considering the increasing number of animation and visual effects studios in the city.

The latest in line is John Woo's Red Cliff', a Chinese epic that Jesh Krishna Murthy and his team of 45 animators and compositors worked on for about eight months. "Our work in the film is a quantum leap, we have done something different, something that people would not usually connect to India. One of the scenes we worked on was the final battle scene that involved thousands of arrows being shot. Rather than working on each arrow individually we created a tool that enabled us to show a number of arrows together," says Murthy citing an example of the VFX in the film.

Having worked abroad in a number of countries like the US, UK and Germany, Krishnamurthy started his firm Anibrain' in Mumbai about three years ago. Over a year ago, he moved base to Pune with a view to expand operations. "Pune is great because it offers a lot from good weather, accessibility to everything and also some decent talent," says Murthy who has worked on a number of Hollywood projects like Batman Begins' and Lara Croft: Cradle of Life'. His firm, Anibrain, on the other hand has worked on projects like Resident Evil: Extinction' and Death Race' among others, about 25 in total with another eight projects in the pipeline.

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Design and animation institute planned in Pune

In a bid to tap more than 80,000 jobs that would come to Indians through outsourcing in animation, gaming and industrial design sectors over next three to four years, the France-based Chamber of Commerce and Valenciennois (CCIV) has joined hands with Pune-based DSK Group to launch the International Institute of Industrial Design, Gaming and Animation in Pune.

The institute will work on parallel lines to CCIV schools to develop designers and animators who can meet the demands of the fast-paced design industry.

CCIV runs three schools in France namely, Iinstitut Supérieur de Design (ISD), Supinfogame and Supinfocom, which are considered to be the top-most design schools in the world.

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Cross Browser Animation

The fundamental idea behind animation has been around for a long time: when a group of images are presented quickly, the series of images seems to form a single moving picture. One of the first examples of this effect was the thaumatrope, a gizmo created by Paul Roget in 1828. A thaumatrope is a disk with a pole or string attached so the disk can be twirled. Each side of the disk contains an illustration, and twirling the disk merges the two illustrations, making it seem that there’s only one image. If the disk has a bird on one side and a cage on the other, twirling the disk gives the illusion that there’s just one image: a bird in a cage.

Animation on the web works in a similar way. In the Web’s early days animators could only use proprietary systems, like Shockwave, or animated GIF files. JavaScript expanded the animator’s repertoire to include rapid GIF swapping. Swapping GIFs with JavaScript makes for quicker downloads than proprietary systems and provides more flexibility than animated GIFs.

Dynamic HTML (DHTML) provides a new range of ways to animate a page. DHTML can animate both text and images and animations can move throughout the browser window, instead of being anchored in one spot. Unfortunately, DHTML can be tricky because of differences between browsers.

This article will cover the basics of cross-browser animation. You’ll learn how to animate text and images. Plus you’ll see how to move HTML elements around the screen. After you’ve finished reading this article, you should be able to add cross-browser compatible DHTML animations to your web pages.

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The name of the game is animation

If art and technology could merge to create a business venture, the animation industry would fit the description nicely. With India’s emergence as a global outsourcing leader in the late 1990s, initial efforts were made to create a vibrant animation outsourcing industry.

There was intense interest from Hollywood and elsewhere to use the unbeatable combination of the country’s artistic talent and low production costs. However, questions of quality and scale were soon raised and the pipeline of outsourcing contracts virtually dried up in the early 2000s.

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