The Australian : Robin Pagnamenta
INDIA is cashing in on a global boom in animated films, special effects and gaming as Hollywood outsources more film-related IT work to the home of Bollywood.
Puss in Boots, the DreamWorks blockbuster starring Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek, was made largely in Bangalore, where a team of more than 150 animators, lighting artists and special effects experts worked on the film for nearly two years.
The work was remotely supervised by the film's director Chris Miller from his base in the United States.
"The quality of work coming out of India is very high ... and the cost base is lower," said Mark Benson, the chief executive of MPC, a London-based post-production house that has also opened a branch in Bangalore specialising in visual special effects.
This has worked on films including those in the Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean series. "Over the next 24 months, I see rapid growth for this type of work."
About 25 billion rupees ($455 million) worth of animation and visual effects work was carried out in India last year, but this is expected to more than double by 2015, according to KPMG, with the fastest growth in animated films.
While some of this growth is being generated by brisk, homegrown demand from India's own movie business, the country's rare combination of IT talent, film-making prowess and low labour costs is making it a global hub for this specialist work.
The cost of labour for the work on Puss in Boots, for example, is believed to have been 40 per cent lower than it would have been in the United States.
"Animation is a big market and India has a lot of talent," Kishore Lulla, chairman of Eros International, the biggest Bollywood film studio, said. Eros operates its own visual special effects and animation business Eye Cube Studios, based in Mumbai. "I think
there is a lot of potential.
''Today we are doing mostly the low-end job work for Hollywood, but increasingly there is an opportunity to do the high-end work, too."
He claimed that an animated film costing $A80 million to produce in America or Europe could cost as little as $10 million to make in India.
For Puss in Boots, which has already collected $A140 million at the box office in the US, the storyboard and a rough pre-visualisation sketch was drawn up by a DreamWorks studio in Los Angeles. The team in India then developed a layout that allowed each character
to be plotted into the film frame by frame.
Biren Ghose, country chief for Technicolor, the company that undertook the work for DreamWorks, said that the team in Bangalore had collaborated closely with other teams in Los Angeles, Vancouver, London and New York to make the finished product.
(The views expressed above are the personal views of the author)