Government is planning to set up a national centre for animation, gaming and visual effects to meet shortage of skilled professionals in the field.
A sum of Rs 52 crore has been set aside by the Planning Commission for the purpose.
Sources in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said the proposed centre would promote technical talent in the entertainment sector through specific courses such as animation, digitisation and visual effects.
The centre, which could come up at Pune, where the Film and Television Institute of India is situated, is being set up for meeting the shortage of skilled professionals in the field.
… With the Indian animation and gaming industry expected to grow, the I&B ministry is said to have engaged a consultant to prepare a report on the human resource requirement in this sector.
… Although there are several private animation-training institutes, apart from a few government-run colleges having animation curriculum, India, as of today, has only a handful of institutes teaching high-end animation techniques, sources say.
The web page of ZEE Institute of Creative Arts is http://www.zica.org.There head office is Mumbai and as per their "Contact Us" page it currently has two campuses in Mumbai and Bhubaneswar. Following is an excerpt from a news Item in Express Buzz about the opening of their Bhubaneswar Campus.
Adding another feather to Capital’s list of institutions offering career-oriented professional courses, Zee Institute of Creative Arts (ZICA) today opened its centre here at Niladri Vihar.
With animation industry in India poised to grow at 27 per cent to reach a 1,163 million dollar mark by 2012, the institute hopes to provide affordable animation courses to cater to the manpower demands when Bollywood alone plans to make another 12 feature films based on animation and special effects. Also the gaming industry is all set to grow rapidly with a huge demand of professionals.
Addressing mediapersons, Head, Youth Business, Zee Learn, Subhadarshi Tripathy said as traditionally Orissa has many well-known animation artists engaged at the national level, ZICA thought it appropriate to open its second centre outside Mumbai here so that students from the entire Eastern Indian states can be given an opportunity to learn the art and equip themselves to take various career opportunities in film making, visual effects, television production and advertising industry.
‘‘ZICA, which first started in Hyderabad way back in 1995, was later shifted to the Esselworld campus in Mumbai and has become the pioneer animation institute with its distinct training style and approach towards industry-oriented curriculum’’, he said adding, however, to maintain quality it never ‘‘opened branches elsewhere outside the city of dreams’’.
The local centre will impart a two-year diploma in animation film making and one-year course in digital arts, but later would also introduce short-term courses. ‘‘While the two-year course would need an investment of around Rs 3 lakh, the short-term ones may vary from Rs 40-75,000’’, he said adding, compared to Mumbai, the local centre will be more affordable with the same standard of teaching and infrastructure facilities.
‘‘For each course there would be a six-faculty team apart from industry professionals as guest faculty and the teacher-student ratio would be around 1:4’’, he pointed out. …
Aptech Global Learning Solutions … These centres will be a combination of Arena Animation Academy and Aptech Computer Education training institutes,†Aptech executive director R. Krishnan told IANS.
“We will also be expanding nationally. New centres will be opened this year at Cuttack, Rourkela, Bhubaneswar, Durgapur, Guwahati and Dibrugarh,†he added.
The course content for the two academies is also going to change from May.
Krishnan said: “With animation and computer training institutes mushrooming everywhere, we are focussing on how our students can get faster and better jobs. We will introduce some new modules and methodologies.
“We have introduced a specialised demo reel making module in the syllabus this year. Earlier, the demo reel was just a part of the curriculum. Now this demo reel will act as the portfolio of a student.â€
The Institute of Digital Media Technology in Bhubaneswar has postgraduate, diploma and certificate programs in animation and digital media technology. Currently they have a special offer on "Learning the art of Digital Technology with working on a live project on "DHARMAPADA" the first animated oriya feature film."
The following youtube video is a 4 minute clip of their 20+ minute short film titled “Chatura Kau.”
Technopark-headquartered Toonz Animation’s sister company Toonz Academy announced Friday plans to open a centre in Hyderabad later this month.
A press release issued here said this would be the latest centre after the opening of the previous one in Delhi last month.
Their other centres are at Thiruvananthapuram, Mumbai and Nagpur.
‘The opening of these centres is just one among the major expansion plans we have in store. We will be opening the academies in Ahmedabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Visakhapatnam and Bhubaneswar in the coming months,’ said Binu Raj, national marketing head of the company.
Toonz Academy is a fully owned subsidiary of Toonz Entertainment Pvt Ltd, Singapore, which also owns Indian animation studio Toonz Animation India Pvt Ltd.