Production houses too,have forayed into the market. These include the Zoo Group of UK (with Maya Entertainment), Mike Young Productions (with Crest Animation) and Decode Entertainment of Canada (with Escotoonz Entertainment), which outsourced both 2D and 3D animation projects. The domestic TV market is still in a nascent stage for animation projects, except for isolated instances like Tenali Raman produced by Toonz Animation, which was broadcast on the Cartoon Network in India.

In the TV broadcast value chain, most of the outsourcing took place in the labor-intensive production stage that required less precision and skill. Services outsourced included creation of animation, lip synchronization, scanning and compositing. However, in FY 2005-06, even post-production services like mixing of audio, elimination and editing of scenes, SFX and final compositing were outsourced.

Another favorite outsourcing area is fully-animated movies. Animation Bridge did three titles for Kahani of Canada, Paprikaas Animation Studio created a 3D fully animated feature film 'X and I' while RichCrest, Crest's US subsidiary, partnered with Mainframe Entertainment and Lions Gate Family Entertainment to co-produce three animated feature films. However, Disney and Dreamworks still outsourced only small parts of a movie or teasers to India.

The domestic market showed promise in animated feature films. These include the highly successful, Hanuman, produced by Sahara Percept and created by Silvertoons, and the critically acclaimed ZEE Telefilms' Bhaggmati-the Queen of Fortunes-animation done by ZICA. However, the direct-to-DVD segment completely depended on offshore outsourcing: Animation Bridge collaborated with PVP Productions and Viskatoons of Canada, Crest Animation with Care Bears for Nelvana and DQ Entertainment with projects like Skyland, Donkey Ollie and Delta State.

The visual effects (VFX) segment bucked the offshore trend and was largely fuelled by domestic demand primarily from Bollywood and South Indian movies. The Aamir Khan-starrer, Mangal Pandey, might have flopped at the box-office but earned rave reviews for both Maya Entertainment and Prime Focus for its VFX work. These two studios led in VFX services as films like Dhoom, Rang De Basanti, Black, Bluff Master, Bunty Aur Babli, Veer Zara, Salaam Namaste and Gangster used substantial effects to make their packages more attractive.

Rang De had a good half-hour of VFX, most notably the runway and the MiG scene. In Bunty Aur Babli, the Big B was nowhere near the train when he caught up with Abhishek and Rani. Instead, he shot at the studio and the train was added in lab. Veer Zara, Salaam Namaste, Sarkaar, and Khamoshi-all opted for visual enhancement, and not the cleaning up variety done earlier during post-production. In Shyam Benegal's Netaji, the U-180 submarine that carries Bose from Germany to Japan was also lab-created, as was the East India Company ship that comes to quell the Mutiny in Mangal Pandey.

 There were instances of reverse outsourcing too when Rakesh Roshan got most of the VFX work for Krrish done from Australia. However, offshore outsourcing on VFX is still minimal-it is primarily the BG Prep work, involving removal of objects that come in the frame during shooting, that are getting outsourced. Prime Focus was working on two film projects with UK-based SFX specialist, Cinesite, while Paprikaas worked on projects for Les Films D'ici, Paris.

Is India Game for It?
The Indian game development industry is characterized by the presence of players such as Dhruva Interactive, Paradox Studios and Indiagames. These provide development service in all four segments of mobile, PC, console and online. Other game developers have positioned themselves as niche players, like Small Device Technology which provides mobile porting service.

Several animation players have set up game development centers. Paprikaas has a separate division, Paprikaas Entertainment Labs, for gaming development while Crest also provides animated content for games. However, other than mobile gaming, the market is primarily catering to offshore outsourcing clients. Global gaming giants like Gameloft and Jamdat have set up offshore centers in India for game development, while Electronic Arts is scouting around for a JV.

The mobile gaming market has generated some domestic demand, primarily from Indian telecom service providers who have been selling games to end consumers. Reliance Infocomm, Tata Indicom and Bharti have developed a pool of more than 100 games as part of their VAS bouquet. Indian gaming companies are increasingly moved towards a co-production model with Indian telecom service providers. Globally, the telecom operators have generated a large amount of revenue through mobile gaming. Subsequently, companies like Dhruva Interactive, Indiagames and Paradox Studios moved up the value chain and started performing the role of publishers by developing their own games. Still, India accounts for only 2% of the worldwide mobile gaming development market in FY 2005-06.

Porting accounted for a significant portion of this outsourcing chunk with companies like Small Device Technologies with internal library of around 200 phones to provide porting services to its clients. Graphics designing is becoming popular as an outsourcing option as mobile and wireless games have started using more animation. Mobile games like Maria Sharapova Tennis by Dhruva Interactive have received rave reviews.

PC and console gaming are other popular offshore outsourcing items. So far, however, mainly the audio, character building, texturing and animation have been outsourced. There is an increasing trend to develop different versions of the same game for different devices. This is increasingly being outsourced. For example, Dhruva Interactive developed the PC version of Mission: Impossible for Infogrames Entertainment and mobile phone version of the popular PC game Slyder.

On the flip side, the game engine has restricted the growth of PC gaming development outsourcing to India. This is because a company that has invested three to five years in developing a game engine, is reluctant to provide it to the outsourced service provider. No wonder, then that in FY 2005-06, around 60% of the mobile games played in India were from abroad and only 40% of the games were developed indigenously.

Companies have now started outsourcing the testing stage of PC and console games to India. On the online gaming front, only the 3D asset creation work was outsourced, but with India posing no significant cost advantage, this sector remains largely untapped.

Rajneesh De
rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in

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