This is a great time to be in the animation and visual effects business. I think over the past few years we have seen the arrival of computer graphics to be a part and parcel of the film making process. Our relatively recent start in India over the last decade has been spectacular, in that we see ourselves becoming an active ingredient in the global production of visual effects driven movies and fully animated movies. The future is even more exciting as all forms of CG film making find new platforms and new opportunities. In the Indian film industry, we’ve seen in the last year that we’ve come back from a rather sluggish box office over the last 4 or 5 years and it’s in no small measure due to the fact that visual effects has contributed to improving the look and the feel and packaging of the content. We see substantial growth in the visual effects area, where we are at about a 6-7 billion rupee market as work done for the international community as well as our home grown film makers… and we see that growing exponentially to the 19 to 20 billion region in the next 4 to 5 years… that’s a very steep climb that I think we are up to the challenge for.
On the animation side, there are two components to what we do. One I think is local production, be it for domestic movies, be it for television, the success of both domestic content and work done in co-production with partners from Canada, Europe, The United States, Australia and many other places and we’re seeing this market climb steadily from about 11 – 12 billion to a 24 billion level in the next 5 years. I think the figures are not indicative of the story, because what we really have before us is the headroom to do much more.
At about 0.8% of the world market we are constrained only by the availability of talent and how quickly we can grow our animators and people in visual effects production to the level of global majors. The significant trend has been the arrival of large companies, like Technicolor and MPC among many others, that have come and made india not just a base for outsourcing but as part as their global ecosystem. It’s no small achievement that MPC’s local team in india have already qualified for two bafta’s just in the last two years and are knocking on the doors of several Oscar shortlisted and nominated titles. It is very heartening to see a couple of hundred people credited in the show reel or the end credits of a dreamworks animated movie… and the big movies that come from Fox and Paramount and Sony and Disney… all of which are created in the studios in India.
We really see a very bright future for this Industry, which combined with the postproduction which also has a lot of digital intermediation that the entire sector between animation, visual effects and post production, in my opinion will grow from its present level of 32 billion rupees to over 75 billion in this period of time. From being a very small and miniscule part of the media and entertainment landscape it is going to have a significant double digit status.
