Be it an animator who actually does the wonderful animation or the aspiring story writer who is aching to tell his stories;
be it the technical director who gets ideas even as he fixes the CG pipeline or a journalist who researches and writes about the industry;
be it the CEO or the studio manager or the student who has joined 3D animation class in the nearby shopping centre…
…all of us in the Animation ecosystem have one GREAT DREAM in common!
That of creating and making our own animated content.
Some day we will make our own animated series and features, and the world will line up to watch the shows, read the comics, buy the toys, play the games. The chocolate and candy brands will outbid each other to obtain license of our characters, the retail stores will fill their racks with our DVDs and CDs, the newspapers will have large sized close-ups of the characters we create, our super heros will be blown up gigantic sized and do the rounds of kids fairs even as the kids squeal with joy as they pose with our characters ….
We want to imagine situations, we want to imagine characters, sometimes we want to make the world laugh out loud, sometimes we want to move the audience to a moist tear, we want to leave a lasting impression on the minds of billions….using our fondness for telling stories, using our imagination to think of brilliant characters, using our talent to breathe life with the pencil and the mouse….. and driven by our desire to connect with humans everywhere.
The deepest individual desire of the Indian animation microcosm is also the collective ambition of the Indian animation macrocosm. There have been numerous seminars and conferences organised by the best of Industry associations and bodies discussing the topic of original content creation at Length.
Those are our dreams, our aspirations……
So why are we not realising our dreams? What stops us?
Rather than trying to answer that. As true-blue dreamers, let�s look at the constructive side of things.
What are the chances that we as original content aspirants get?
There are short films, there are comics, there are kids books, there are webisodes, there are mobisodes, there is home video, there is utube, there is your own website which you can build around your own content. All these above mentioned are relatively affordbale ways of getting your original stories to the audience. Once they are liked and become popular, it doesn�t really take time to get signed on for broadcast, feature etc.
Does it?
There are other opportunities too….
FICCI, NASSCOM, ABAI, TASI, ASIFA India, all powerful and respectable bodies hold their conferences around the year and these are aimed at addressing various issues facing the studio, the artist as well as the ecosystem.
And over the past couple of years one has observed that the original content topic has been getting more and more attention. The recently held FICCI Seminar at Thiruvananthapuram had three sessions related to original content creation in Animation. The ASIFA India – TASI organised International Animation Day had workshops on acting in animation, creating and drawing original characters. TASI organised three workshops this month with maestros who have made a brand out of their studios and themselves by doing original content.
The upcoming NASSCOM Animation & Gaming India 2007 has quite a few sessions on original content too. What�s more is that it has a specially created excercise called The Indian Animation Super Pitch 2007.
The aim of the Super Pitch is to create an equal playing field for all those with ideas and dreams of making it in original content.
No matter whether you are a systems administrator or a production manager or a texturing artist or a in betweening artist, as long as you have an idea that�s really bullseye, you have a chance of being heard and exposing your talent to the industry, of course there is an equal opportunity for those who have been professionally developing concepts for years too.
Studios that have been championing original content in spite of all odds and have put their money where their mouth is, might say, we have already been there, done that, what�s in it for us? We pitch in person to most of the professionals in the audience and the jury, we have shows commissioned already. What�s in it for us.
One point needs to be noted here that, we all have to participate at such events and support initiatives like these. Haven�t we all been speaking or hearing (depending on which side of the table we are from) about producers with lots of money to spend, but no creators of good content.
Be it pioneers or be it aspirants, we all need to take part and collectively create that velocity which is needed.
There is a saying that �Practice makes perfect� and the NASSCOM Indian Animation Super Pitch 2007 or any other such future initiatives by so many of the industry bodies are akin the rough stone where creative minds can sharpen the claws of their imagination.
It is from here that we will get our future animation writers, our ideators and project developers who will beat the gravity of non feasability and propel us into the creative universe.
So let�s start practising
let�s start participating
let�s start pitching!
Till then, from one Animation dreamer to another…….
See you at the NASSCOM Indian Animation Super Pitch 2007….. and at all the other original content excercises that the industry initiates