One of the front runners in the Indian animation space, Crest Animation Studios has signed a deal with renowned French producer Marathon for a new 3D animated series (22 mins x 52 episodes).
While the total size of the Marathon project (including pre and post) is estimated at US$18Million (as stated in the official release), Crest Animation Studios CEO AK Madhavan shared with Animation ‘xpress that,”For Crest, the value of this contract is in excess of US$5Million and the deal is purely a work for hire one”
The animation production for the entire 52 episodes will have a two year timeline with the first delivery of 26 episodes to be made by Crest to Marathon in a year’s time.
Commenting upon the show Madhavan remarked,”We are very excited about working on this fresh action based kids TV series which is very stylised. Crest will be handling the animation production right from modelling and texturing stages to animation and compositing”
Be it in the animation for Jakers, or the 3D Squash & stretch for Pet Alien or the dynamics for Bratz, every time we have delivered projects to our clients, we have set new benchmarks in terms of production. We will yet again set new benchmarks in terms of production quality with the Marathon show” he added.
Crest recently delivered Arthur’s Missing Pal a direct to DVD and currently is working on the 3D animated theatrical feature Sylvester and the Magic pebble, which is the first of the ‘Three feature co production, co financing agreement’ that Crest has entered into with US based Lions Gate Entertainment.
The makers plan to release Sylvester… somewhere between summer and fall of 2008, while the other two features will be released subsequently, each after a gap of 6-8 months from the other. The production schedule will also follow the same pattern.
Crest’s current production slate also includes the Marathon project as well as Casper (Direct to DVD).
In the past one year, the studio has also entered the Gaming animation and asset production space where it did work on a couple of titles for UK based Blitz. These include Pac Man (3D) and the Bratz game.
“We are planning to set up a special team to market our production services to the gaming industry” quipped Madhavan.
In order to accomodate its expansion plans the mumbai based studio has shifted from its Worli base into a spanking new spacious facility spanning 45,000 sq feet at Ghatkopar (W).
The new facility will house multiple creative discussion rooms, focused training cum preview rooms and a massive state of the art server room keeping in mind the company’s plans to up its server capacity to 1000 from the existing 200 servers.
The facility boasts of ‘the works’ in terms of having provision for acting room, gym, cybercafe, cafeteria as well as artists corners at select spots within the studio.
Speaking about the shift to the new facility, Madhavan shared,”This shift will enable our animators to work in a world class state of the art facility and the fact that it can house about 750 artists (with two shift operations) will help us to meet our expanding order book”
The studio currently has a team strength of 350 out of which 250 are artists while 100 are in technical as well as supportive roles.