I just foundAndi S. Boediman’s Blog site IDEONOMICS.  Andi runs the Digital Studio College in Jakarta and was one of my hosts while visiting there for SIGGRAPH 2008. While some of the blog is in the Bhasa languange I think it might be interesting for anyone who wants to track what’s going on in the burgeoning business of digital content creation in Indonesia. I’ll create a perma-link in the blog-roll.
There’s an AnimationMentor.com student named Chaitanya Limaye who attended my presentation in Pune, India. After the presentation, Chand and I viewed his work from the Mentor program. As it turns out, my friend Joe Mandia is his mentor. Small world!
This is an earlier short piece of animation from the team that’s working on Hey Krishna. It was done at AniRights before Reliance bought them and they became Big Animation. For a behind the scenes look at the production, check out the link over at CG Tantra
L to R: Chand, Kamlesh Pandey, Ashish S.K., Xray, Pratchi, Nupur
Chand took me to visit a really amazing animation studio in Pune called “Big Animation”. We were treated to lunch by CEO Ashish S.K. and I was honored to meet one of Bollywoods most well known writers Kamlesh Pandey. We had a spirited discussion about Indian literature, Joseph Campbell and Bollywood film making. They’ve really got it together. Big Animation is working on both 2-D and 3-D animation. They have several hundred employees and their studio is totally state of the art. They showed me some previews of their work on a project called Hey Krishna. There are two versions of it and both look very good. They aren’t cutting any corners. One is a 3D animation for broadcast televsion and the other is a traditional 2D version for theatrical release. The 2D animation looks every bit as good as Dreamworks Prince of Egypt. Big Animation uses Flash as well as several proprietary systems and according to Vikram, the director n of Hey Krishna, they are torturing Flash in ways it was never intended. The artwork is stunning.
Animation Express posted an overview of my presentation at Whistling Woods in Mumbai. A few things got lost in translation and it leaves the impression that Bee Movie was done with Massive while it was really done using Dreamworks/PDI’s “Mob” system but overall it captures the gist of things.
No, Spicy Cricket isn’t a type of food off a street cart in Thailand… It’s my friend Angie’s nom de plume. She’s cross posted some of the the pictures from my SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 speakers tour on her web site Thinking Animation
After the presentation one of the participants introduced himself to me and gave me a great gift – A picture he’d drawn of me at the podium. His name is Harsh and he’s got an impressive web site up at http://www.inkbrushme.com. Somone should hire this guy as a concept or boards artists or something.
This morning we went to check out a business incubator called Frameboxx. This is a picture of some of their animators. They have a pretty cool business model. They have a bunch of cg artists accepted to their program who train on real world projects. They get the projects in-house by offering free work for back end participation of the projects if they sell, so if you’ve got a computer animation pilot episode for something in mind and have some strong art direction they’ll execute the first episode for you free of charge. If the pilot sells, you pay them based on your arranged contract. It’s a really neat idea. They are also bronze sponsors of SIGGRAPH Asia 2008. http://www.frameboxx.in/