Thursday 12 June 2014

Animation: From paper-pencil to the big screen



Animation is one of the fastest growing outsourced services industries in India. Whether it’s about outsources content or content for the domestic market, Indian animators are proving their might. The recent Hollywood releases such as Life of Pie & Frozen had Indian animators weaving their magic. Apart from this animators have also shown their might in Indian blockbusters such as Krrish 3, Dhoom 3 and Chota Bheem. As a result of this exponential growth, the Indian animation industry needs a skilled workforce to remain competitive on a global scale.
It is very important in today’s date to have expert animators which requires quality education in animation education apart from up-to-date IT infrastructure to support the same. Students need modern infrastructure, a professional environment and a wide variety of courses to support students requirements. A student might be interested in 2D or 3D or maybe VFX or rigging or lighting; the sector is so vast that one single individual cannot educate himself/herself with the entire ecosystem. During the course of study, a student will not only learn the visual language that every animator has to learn at some stage or the other, character presentation, software, sketching, portfolio design, etc. A reputed institute will always keep itself updated to the latest developments in technology worldwide this can be either be the improvements in hardware or animation software. As at the end of the day, these factors will affect the output that an animator generates as it is this output which is a blend of his/her ideas, creativity and skills and will be a stepping stone towards recognition in the industry. Therefore students go through a long and cumbersome process while choosing an animation institute as very few government or state universities teach the subject so a potential candidate has to look to private institutions and mostly programmes are not of degree level but of diploma level. The good thing is that many a animation institutes have international partnerships with international animation colleges where they can do either a year or two in India and can do their final year in the college’s international campus. At a later stage, this also gives them the benefit while applying for a job in the animation industry. However, one needs to see that the animation institute of the course covers the basic elements of animation such as drawing, animation techniques, fundamentals of movement, character design, lighting, landscape design, etc so that they can focus on one particular area at a later stage of their curriculum.

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