Pune-based Animation conglomerate BIG Animation Studios (a Reliance Big Entertainment company) has got another reason to celebrate!

Led by CEO Ashish Kulkarni, the animation studio which already has a number of awards in its bouquet has now bagged the Maharashtra IT Awards '08 - Multimedia and Entertainment for its outstanding research and development (R&D) in the media and entertainment space. The runner-up in the same category was Rythm and Hues (R&H), which has been known for its cutting edge quality work in national and international movies.

Big Animation CEO Ashish Kulkarni receives the award from CM Vilasrao Deshmukh

Ashish Kulkarni received the prestigious award at the hands of Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh at the Maharashtra IT Awards '08 held today evening at Malabar Hill in Mumbai.

Congratulating the winners at the award ceremony, Vilasrao Deshmukh said, "I would like to felicitate each one of you for placing the state at the forefront of the IT sector. I welcome any positive suggestions in framing of a new policy."

Talking about the growth of IT industry, he said, "Till date a total of 49 IT parks, including 36 in the public sector have become operational. Besides these completed parks, another 302 IT parks are under implementation in the state. Most are in Mumbai, Pune and Thane creating an IT knowledge corridor."

Rythm and Hues Kedar Raut receives the runner up award		Samuel Nair, Technology and Pipeline Lead and Kedar Raut, Assistant Manager at R&H

Kedar Raut, Assistant Manager and Samuel Nair, Technology and Pipeline Lead at R&H added, "It's an honour for us to receive this award from the Maharashtra government. It makes us feel good that the government is encouraging the IT and animation fraternity. We look forward to more encouragement and such recognition from government, in the time to come."

Ashish Kulkarni

AnimationXpress.com caught up with an elated Ashish Kulkarni on his drive back to Pune.

Excerpts from the interview…

Your comments on winning this award…
Maharashtra IT Award '08 - Multimedia and Entertainment Award is definitely a great encouragement for all our employees and all the initiatives that our leadership team has taken. Getting recognition from the government is very special. I am really thankful to all the initiatives that our colleagues have taken in the area of assuring quality in terms of story, design and production; providing the right kind of insights for the creative talent to come and make their careers in animation. I think this is a true recognition for the hard work that has happened in the space of HR; in such a short time we had more than 300 new employees come and join us.

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What contribution of yours towards the industry has won you the award?
It's primarily the quality we create and the kind of employment that we are providing to several artists in and around Maharashtra.

Contribution in terms of technology…
We are a registered DIC (District Industry Centre) unit and they have been constantly coming and looking at what we have been doing. There have been quite a few interventions where they have known what kind of work we do and what kind of technology we implement to produce high quality work.

Please share something about technology at BIG Animation?
BIG Animation has really researched and benchmarked technology for years. Most of the technology that has come to BIG Animation has come for the first time in India. Many of the critical integration that we have run within BIG Animation and proprietary production control tool and a large amount of plugins that we have developed make us really unique. We have a state-of-the-art studio that can produce end-to-end studio properties, like ideation to script and script to screen.

Recently Foundry Networks also provide some of its services to Big Animation. Can you throw some light on this aspect?
Foundry is a very progressive networking company throughout the world. They have a very strong product called Big Iron - Rx which is an advanced gigabit ready at this point in time, although the world is getting ready for gigabit networking. The technology they provided is really superb and the new networking tool that they had was for first time provided to BIG Animation. Same was the case with Blue Arc Titan 2200, another first in India. Besides, to have a Quadcore end-to-end studio is unique.

How is it going to help in terms of output and technology?
Most critical part of animation is when you have the artists; you need to really see that your technology is properly integrated in a way which makes life easy for the artist. The artist would like to make sure that every single tool that they are used to or would like to get used to is learnt properly before they apply that into production pipeline.

I think the way we have integrated these new technologies, the technical team has done a fantastic job of integrating the whole pipeline. That's one of the reasons why in the same studio you have ideation to design; pre production; 2D and 3D animation with post production and sound everything integrated along with the finishing tools like Smoke and Flame. To have an end-to-end complete studio with full integration has been quite a challenging task.

What do you think about creative process behind the technology?
The creative process enables you to benchmark where your technology is working. The thing is that, there are large amount of things within the animation process that go for duplication of work. That's one of the reasons why process automation helps in many ways and somebody has to constantly think and make sure that you have process automation tools written. That's how you make sure that your production pipeline smoothens out.

It's an understanding of the creative process by the technology guys and making sure that they provide the right kind of solutions and tools to their creative colleagues. Although the creative teams are always huge vis-à-vis the technology teams in the studios, but those few technology guys really help make life easy for 95 per cent of the studio. That's the difference between a successful and a not-so-successful studio.

What about the creative talent at BIG?
In India, in 2003-2004 we were trying to migrate people from traditional animation to learn 3D animation. Now when IP is getting created, some of the best guys who have fully migrated to 3D have to step back and say "ok I am going to go back to the pencil and the eraser" and they go back to storyboard tool from Toon Boom and Mudbox which is helping them to do design and pre production in the digital format. The time has come that some of these guys go back to pre production which will only make India proud. And I am extremely glad to share with you that many of these initiatives have come from the talent in BIG Animation.

Your company recently shifted base from Bangalore to Pune. What is different in Pune in terms of talent, working culture, environment and so on?
Moving to Pune was always there on our agenda. We are concentrating on creating domestic as well as international content. The nature of pre production and production work increased as we were no longer an outsourcing studio alone. Consequently, we had to spend a lot of time in Mumbai - sometimes in Chennai also - because all the voice artists, writers, musicians and the post production guys are all based out of these places. That made us think that if only one or two guys have to go and interact with these people all the time, moving to Pune would make life much more easier. Because then many from Mumbai would like to drive down from Mumbai to Pune and spend time with the creative team, so that everybody is on the same plane. Our dependency on Mumbai is also very high and hence it is saving precious time for us.

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