NASSCOM Animation & Gaming India 2007: Session Wise Coverage
The Indian IP session at NASSCOM was chaired by Kahani World Founder and CEO Biren Ghose and panelists included Ittina Animation Studios animator Manu Ittina, Adlabs Animation Head Siddhartha M Jain and ettaminA studios CEO Amit Anand.
All the panelists, as well as the session chair are currently involved in IP creation and they shared their day to day experiences, the thrills and travails of being involved in animation IP creation in India
Session Chair Biren Ghose began, “I believe the local connect is really important. Initially Japanese Anime was made only for Japan and it stayed that way for 40 years and then it moved out and today it is a huge rage across the developed markets in US and in Europe. You should always make content first for local people and then move out to the other markets”
Adlabs Animation’s Siddhartha Jain shared pointers for building IP in the Indian market. “It is very important to understand the audienceâ€?s tastes and changing preferences. The audience should perceive value in the IP and the objective is not only in creating IP, but Valuable IP”
Identifying resources for IP in India, Jain shared, “Selecting the right idea and identifying its essence is of great importance. Sources for IP include Mythology, Bollywood, Historicals, Super Heroes, Movie Characters, Brands, Existing Properties, New World ideas with space and Aliens etc, and lastly completely original characters and story lines”
“While content generated in the public domain comes in with a built in audience” shared Siddharth, one has to keep in mind that “Using public domain properties might reduce the licensing potential” limits value and exploitation of the IP”
Speaking about the positive chaos existent in Indian animation when it came to IP, Ittina Studiosâ€? Manu Ittina shared, “Indian animation IP as a concept has never been tried on scale before. So the truth is nobody really knows how to do it. This is a great oppourtunity for us to find out how to do it and to try out different styles of stories and designs that can define indian animation!”
He further added that, “The distribution channels and marketing channels in the US is very organized. In India we do not take full potential of all availible sources of revenue. Because of this budgets tend to be lower and hence quality suffers. The great positive now is that we have retail sectors and film distribution getting organised. This means that animation can be marketed properly and all ancillary sources of revenue be it merchandising or home video be full utilized.”
“The encouraging fact is that there is a great desire to see content thats home grown. Its a great opportunity for young artists to create something definitive for animation.” he further added.
Giving his point of view, ettaminAâ€?s Amit Anand shared, “I think IP is the way forward and we are going in the right direction. Good writers are critical to this industry and we need to focus on collectively developing the writing talent. We need to go out in the markets and carry out research, we need to shed the fear of sharing ideas. Sharing ideas is extremely important for growing this movement”
Agreeing with Amit Anand, Manu Ittina emphatically pointed out, “People are obsessed about their ideas. IP is very exciting. There are millions of ideas out there. Ideas are not succesful because of the idea but with the way they are executed. Donâ€?t be obsessed about loosing one idea you have thought of. What’s valuable is the way you present it”
Biren Ghose added, “The focus has to be on the audience preferences”
Sharing with the delegates, one final takeaway from the session, Amit Anand stated, “Creating original content development is more like an engineering process than developing a painting. There are preset steps that need to be taken that can ensure your content meets the market expectations or, alternatively, creates a new market segment”