India has many successful animation IPs but most of them haven’t travelled to international markets. The country is known for its animation services but there’s no big success story of India in the animation industry. Keeping that in mind, there’s a new studio in town which is set to fill this gap and have a development in the international markets.
This studio is formed by none other than the ex-Star India vice-president and head of content syndication, Vivek Bhutyani. He had mentioned in November that he planned to venture into the OTT sector and seems like his vision is still in place. For the past few months, the man has been in the process of launching India’s first learning and development focused content streaming platform for kids – Lattu Kids.
Lattu Kids is a fully integrated kid’s entertainment firm which is based out of Singapore and India. It aims to produce and showcase the best International content in India and Southeast Asia. Lattu Kids, founder and CEO, Vivek Bhutyani says, “I have been passionate about kids’ content as I have a five-year-old son and while watching the various content available for kids these days, it made me realise that there’s hardly any content which impart values to kids. Seeing this gap, I decided to venture into the kids segment as this space has a lot of things which can be explored.”
To make his vision come to life, Bhutyani partnered with Bengaluru based animation studio, Thought Cloud Studio to co-produce an animated series, Trigo.
Here’s the synopsis of the series: Trigo is the story of a playful and adorable young tiger cub who loves to explore just about everything, often landing in troublesome situations. But thanks to the patience and understanding of his parents and well-wishers, Trigo emerges unscathed, a little wiser, though no less naughty!
Trigo is a 3D CGI series targeted at the preschool segment which comprise of the three to seven year olds. Season One will comprise of 26 episodes, each episode will be of seven minutes. The studios jointly decided to use India’s national animal – Tiger as their character as they wanted to keep the Indian flavour present. Been in the industry for the past three years, Thought Cloud Studio makes it a point to keep their content Indian but it meets the international standards.
“Basically the idea of coming out with Trigo is to cater to the children of three to seven year olds who can relate to the content as the stories will revolve around their daily lives. While stories have a fun element, it also imparts value as that’s what we thought was missing as most of the content around kids is around violence or slapstick comedy. We wanted to create content which is meaningful and relatable to parents and kids alike,” explains Bhutyani.
Along with Thought Cloud Studio, creative director, G Venugopal working on the IP, about 20 to 25 people are also creatively involved in this project. The FX and music has been produced in Chennai whereas the voice-over has been done by international voice cast.
Thought Cloud Studio director – business, sales and marketing Ganesh Papanna reveals, “Bhutyani and I met each other during last year’s FICCI FRAMES and since then we have been in constant contact. Lattu Kids and Thought Cloud Studio have been working on this IP since the past few months and both the companies are equally investing in this property.”
As Lattu Kids has the strength of distribution, marketing, sales and creative inputs, the company will be more focused on these aspects whereas Thought Cloud Studio will put in their efforts exclusively on detailing and developing world class product as their forte lies in pre-production and production.
With its pilot episode ready, Trigo made its debut at the Kidscreen Summit which was held at Miami from 13 to 16 February, 2017. The pilot was received well by the attendees and broadcasters.
Bhutyani further states, “We have already pitched Trigo to international broadcasters and some of them are already talking to us. We are also open to discussing it with Indian broadcasters as we are a purely digital media. If needed, we can dub the series in Hindi and other regional languages.”
Trigo recently got nominated for the FICCI BAF Awards. It got itself nominated under all the four categories it had taken part in: Promo Film (International), Promo Film (Indian), Episode (International) and Episode (Indian). What makes it special is the fact that it’s the only content which has received the highest amount of nominations this time. Earlier, Thought Cloud Studio had won the BAF Award in 2015 under the Best Animation Promo in the International category for its IP – Indrajeet.
With four nominations under its hood, we can definitely expect Trigo to bag at least one award at the awards night which is taking place tomorrow in Mumbai at the FICCI FRAMES.
As for the VOD streaming platform, Lattu Kids which will have original shows and international acquired content, will be launched soon. For now, to know the kind of content which will be available on the platform, one can check Lattu Kids’ YouTube channel.
