Technicolor in line with its corporate rebranding efforts, and as a follow-up to its recent purchase of 100% ownership of Paprikaas, announced today that it has rebranded its Paprikaas animation studio to Technicolor India.
Over the past year, Technicolor has significantly expanded its animation offering in India, while strengthening its long-standing relationships with DreamWorks Animation, Nickelodeon, Electronic Arts and other animation and gaming content creators. More recently, Technicolor has grown the Bangalore studio to include visual effects, as well as compression and authoring services. The studio has produced CG animation since 2001.
“India has emerged as the Asian destination of choice for animation. This enhances our India investments in Paprikaas over the past few years. We have aggregated and developed the best and the finest skill sets in the industry blending international and local artists,” said Frederic Rose, CEO, Technicolor. “Our point of difference is that we have migrated the best practices, garnered through our connectivity with our global business partners. We plan to continue our aggressive growth path in India. Our facility is expanding to support both our core animation and gaming businesses, our visual effects offerings and our compression and authoring services.”
Nickelodeon‘s new Kung Fu Panda TV series, produced for the worldwide broadcast market, and initially comprising 26 episodes, is currently being animated at Technicolor India. Nickelodeon and Technicolor have developed a strong production relationship based on the studio‘s CGI work on Penguins of Madagascar, rated the No. 1 kids‘ show on cable TV in the United States.
Biren Ghose, the studio‘s general manager, stated, “Consolidating further within Technicolor gives us greater scope and opportunity, while providing our artists from all over the country the opportunity to work on great projects with ‘a-list‘ clientele.”
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com, Technicolor CEO, Frederic Rose added, “Animation is going to grow very very big globally and it will grow very fast over the next 5 to 10 years across all the spheres of digital entertainment.” On being asked about the investment that has gone into Technicolor India, Rose replied, “There has been a lot of significant investment but that is Capex, the real investment that has been, is in terms of people, the time and their experience. It is in the training and the processes and the workflows.”
“In this business you are only as good as the last movie you have made and our focus and challenge is to raise the bar every time in every project we do.” Rose informed that Technicolor invests USD 70 million in research every year and also shared that the R&D team of Paprikaas will be integrated into the Technicolor research team worldwide.
He concluded by saying, “In high end VFX there is more demand than capacity. Technicolor India will be doubling its head count in the next two years.”