“In terms of execution capability, the aim is that the team at the Chennai facility should be able to achieve everything that can be accomplished by our artists and team at Culver City”
With Sony Pictures Imageworks picking up equity in Chennai based Frameflow and officially renaming it as Imageworks India, the position of India on the global CG/ VFX map is further enhanced.
The good quality and delivery standards achieved by some of the Indian studios of late as well as the exemplary performance of the Indian facilities of International studios, have boosted Hollywood’s confidence in India.
AnimationXpress.com Managing Editor Anand Gurnani met up with Imageworks India’s Hitesh Doshi & Krishnakant Mishra and Sony Pictures Imageworks EVP – Production Jenny Fulle to get a glimpse of the plans in store…
Excerpts…
Your comments on the formation of Imageworks India?
The competition is getting stiffer internationally and has resulted in the need for having an Overseas presence. India is certainly amongst the best destinations. In the past one year, Chennai based Frameflow (Now Imageworks India) has worked on nearly a dozen of our projects and the quality, delivery and our overall relationship has been extremely good.
Both these factors resulted in our taking our relationship with Frameflow to the next level. We have picked up equity in Frameflow which is now officially Imageworks India.
Imageworks India will give us a competitive edge in terms of price, delivery and scalability even while we maintain our highest quality standards.
And this is also a very significant development for Indian Animation / VFX.
Your plans for Imageworks India?
In terms of execution capability, the aim is that the team at the Chennai facility should be able to achieve everything that can be accomplished by our artists and team at Culver City. It is the same company with a facility in another location.
We are going to focus on training and technology transfer in a big way. The training will involve both, the technical as well as creative skills of the artists and will focus on a big way in advanced techniques in rotoscopy, match move, compositing, animation as well as training in Motion Capture.
Also, the technology transfer would mean all our proprietary tools, workflows and software would be implemented at the Chennai facility too and the artists would get trained on that.
In fact the Indian studio is capable of doing a much higher level of work than what has been sent here so far. One of the reasons we could not share some of the work was the execution needed to be done on our proprietary tools and software. Of course, now since our relationship has gone to an altogether different level with the formation of Imageworks India, these will be shared.
What’s the current slate at Imageworks India?
We cannot mention some of the movies as yet, but amongst the big ones that we are in a position to talk about include Spiderman-3 and I am a Legend.
Spiderman-3 has quite a large number of rotos, wrig removals and complex paint work.
The interesting thing about I am A Legend which stars Will Smith and has a lot of VFX work is that it was on its way out of the Door, to the UK.
Forming Imageworks India by investing in Frameflow and hence being able to offer high quality at the right price point was amongst one of the important factors that helped us retain this film. As I mentioned earlier, competition is very stiff and having an Indian facility is a way for us to have a competitive edge.
Any Indian artist community related initiatives?
As an international company we would like to collectively grow the talent pool in the Industry and not just the people that we have hired. There is a lot of raw talent in the country and we will be actively engaging with the artist community in Chennai as well as all across India.
One of the initiatives that we might start with, is IPAX ? Imageworks Pictures Academic Excellence program where we work with the educators and teach the teachers. We are exploring the idea in India also.
Additional comments?
We are currently 80 people and are looking to ramp up. Within 6 months we plan to move into a new facility inside Chennai City in an IT Park which will be spread across 20,000 sq feet with a seating capacity for 300. And watch out, a lot of great stuff is going to come out of Imageworks India!