'DNA' Conversations: Animation means many things to many people

Animation as a form of entertainment has evolved considerably and transcended age barriers. With its new approach, the genre now appeals to adults as much as to children. Within India itself, experts have envisaged that even though growth for this industry will be exponential in the short-term, the industry would need to ramp up the numbers of trained manpower. But India has a lot to catch up on. Animation movies began being made only a decade ago, compared to the West where such movies were embarked upon in the 1920s.

Obviously, therefore, there are concerns about a demand-supply mismatch and the industry’s ability to realise its untapped potential. Is it the fault of the students? Do they have expectations beyond their level of competence? What do employers look for?

DNA’s Vijay Pandya, discussed the current scenario and what lies ahead with a cross-section of industry representatives. The panel included (in alphabetical order) Chand RK, director, Digitales Studios and co-founder, www.cgtantra.com; Arnab Choudhary, director, Arjuna The Warrior Prince; Bhavika Chouhan, Sr VP - marketing, Maya Academy of Advanced Cinematics; Mehul Hirani, creative director, Crest Animation Studios Ltd.; Kireet Khurana, director, Toonpur Ka Superhero and chief creative officer, Frameboxx; Easo Thampy Mathew, country head, Arena Animation; Sapan Narula, managing partner, Epic Studios; Ram Warrier, head - corporate marketing, Aptech Ltd.

Given below are edited excerpts.

Skill sets required
Choudhary: By making a clear distinction among various job roles ranging from the artist to technician, is largely how the studios operate and you will hire workforce accordingly. You will hire people with the stipulation: “30% of my staff needs to be technically sound, but need not be visionaries. They need to be able to operate the tools, but they don’t need to be able to create original IP [intellectual property] or design a character or anything else.” So there is a certain balance that needs to be maintained and as long as that balance is a healthy one, we’re heading in the right direction.

Chand: My creative team is asking, “Who gives the guy coming through an institute with the choice [of career]? Who makes them realize that after five years or six years or seven years, is he going to be a technician and work ahead on the path like this, or you’re going to be a thinking animator or a director and then, how do you guys handle it?” Because what we are facing, and I’m sure all of us are facing, is a similar question: “Is it that the guy who comes to us as a fresher doesn’t know [the growth path of the job he is meant to do]? Is it that he doesn’t know maybe because when he was being taught, or he was undergoing training, that part of training was not part of the course?” I mean I don’t know if that’s the missing part of the puzzle.

Chouhan: Culturally also, the way education has evolved in India, it is very different from the way it is abroad. Over there, creativity is built into a child from very early ages whereas here that’s not the case. The emphasis is more on academic orientation… So that has been always a critical factor – how to evoke in them the culture of India and something like creativity.

Matthew: The student’s perception of anything is to find a job. That’s the very base of their strategy. And if you look at animation, the perception started with is the IT base. So their approach was from that point of view -- they were trying to learn tools. There is nothing wrong in it. The student perceives that “I need to get a job”. And so if learning these tools is going to get him a new job, that’s it. That’s where he will start. If you look at the international scenario, there the perception is totally different; there is a culture of understanding. So all of a sudden we cannot say that the animation training institutes or the animation industry should be creating only intellectuals. It doesn’t have to. I need a job. That’s the perception. The industry required, at that point of time, labourers or tools-oriented people. So institutes catered to this need, and it’s evolving.

Khurana: Most of the animation education space is actually with training institutes, where people are essentially being trained in software. That’s the way we started, which is need-based training. What really needs to be done is basically move from need-based training to value-based education, which is a holistic understanding and a holistic revamp of the entire curriculum. The job is to create thinking animators, because that’s how we’ll be going up in the value chain.

Hirani: I agree that the number of students, who come out, whom you can really absorb into your studio, is not adequate. But my personal experience has been that I have found some really, really clean freshers, who have performed amazingly well, so I don’t want to take away that skill from them. But there are students, even artists, who do not know why they have come into this industry – it is not very clear to them. The day the student’s understanding becomes clearer -- that I am here just because I really love to do what I am doing – that is when his work will cease to appear as hard work.

Warrier: The way I understand it, in any which way you look at it, studios typically operate with their own proprietary software, with their own methodologies of what they prepare. So what we do is to prepare students only up to a particular stage. After that they are anyway taken into the studios. What is important for us is to impart -- apart from tools and knowledge of software stuff like that – are the very fundamentals of the concepts involved. And if we are able to work on that properly, and are able to give the student who is going to the studios those very basics, it would make the students more relevant to their employers. The studios would welcome it.

Narula: It becomes very difficult to find the right people. Most of the people in the industry are all operators. They can operate software. But finding a person who can understand concepts and work on visual effects, is good with colours and good at visualising how it’s going to be at the end of the day, how the output will turn out to be, is not easy. This is even true in the case of animation, where like with modelling, they need to be trained in the very aesthetics.

The training scenario in India
Chouhan: Earlier it was very difficult for a child to go back home and say that I want to do a course in animation. ‘You are going to make cartoons?’ was the immediate reaction of the parent. This is no longer a fact today. In the major metros, mini metros as well as tier-three cities also, animation has now evolved as a career; it has got established. People are quite keen in terms of sending their kids into animation as they understand what’s happening in this industry. And at the same time, there is enough hard work also. So there are two kinds of people here; there is a creative side as well as a labour side. Though it’s a new age career, there are lots of aspirations. A lot of hype is also there in terms of the industry glamour. So they coming into the system thinking that “okay, we’re going to be James Cameron from day one or we’re going to be Steven Spielberg from day one”. In fact, we also have evolved lot at our end, primarily to overcome the mismatch between their expectations and workplace reality. We had a dedicated two-month sketching program initially but slowly realised that they don’t want to go through that kind of a rigorous training program. From day one they want to be on software. So we tried to evolve, to find some other way, so that creativity is instilled into them. We must also recognise the fact that this generation is also very different, expectations are very high from their end and that they are very impatient. Everything must be got immediately.

Warrier: Obviously, the guys who come to us are pretty young and not probably clear on what they want to do and haven’t decided or maybe don’t know what this field is really all about. Our job largely is to, first of all, educate them on what this is about, what this industry is about, what are the jobs on offer, what’s the kind of genre they can cater to. If you take the MBA course or you take engineering or any stream, you’ll obviously find a huge number of people of all kinds; some who are very good, some who are average, some who are not up to the mark. That is true with animation as well. We try out all possible ways, even trying to improve their basic education, in order to convey to them, to give them a perspective of what they are getting into and what they should be doing. But then I think they are also pretty young at that age, to decide what they want to do, once they get into the field which is a fairly new area of employment. They will then have to decide whether they want to become a regular [or stereotyped] employee or grow into an “xyz” by the time they get around. I think the focus at our end is largely to keep them informed of what the actual needs are and also prepare them for what the industry looks for and requires of them. We do a lot apart from just training and teaching; these are add-ons in terms of what we think the industry is looking for and trying to give them that edge when they get there.

Matthew: When you decide to operate in the market -- as a student, as a training faculty, as a recruiting person, as a studio, as an outsourcing agent, or as a person creating content -- it’s about competence. As a student, I should be competent enough to deliver on the promise I have made to myself, to my parents to my teachers. Whether I’m going to be a modeller, rigger or technician, whatever it is, I must be competent. So the competence has to be there. And if it’s a training institute which is trying to deliver a course, or content, to the student, they should ensure competence. As a training institute, I need to be aware that the student, who is coming to me, has to be competent as an input, and then emerge as a competent output, much better then what he or she was earlier – irrespective of whether the job we are preparing him for is his objective in life, because at that age he is highly impressionable. Somebody has told him that animation is good or somebody told him that go and learn. So he was influenced.

Khurana: Take just one specific skill like modelling. If you do not know anatomy, if you do not know design, if you do not know form, if you do not know a whole lot of other things like sculpting or clay modelling, then you have a problem. That modelling skill remains pretty much, like, you know, knowing Photoshop, without really knowing how to paint. So, how long does it take for somebody to learn Photoshop, without learning how to paint? Therefore, it is imperative that, if somebody is doing a course in modelling, the teaching institute at least informs the students of all the related skills and aspects about his area of education. At the same time, the person who is doing the modelling should at least know what the story of the film is. He must try and learn how this particular piece of whatever he is creating is going to fit into the entire scheme of things. So if the student loses sight of a holistic picture or perspective of the entire final product. That is very important.