The Hindu Business Line : Crest plans foray into full-fledged animation films

A WEEK back, Hollywood's latest big-ticket animation films, The Incredibles and Polar Express, were topics of keen discussion at Mr A.K. Madhavan's Worli office.

For the present, India's best-known animation company is still a viewer like us, less a creative force in the multi-million dollar global market that full-length animation films have nudged open.

But even as it maintains its portfolio of outsourced work in the television, film and DVD space, Crest Animation Studios Ltd (it returned to profit in the first two quarters of current fiscal) is getting into original, full-fledged animation films.

"We are in the process of developing two concepts and have prepared the preliminary designs for a pilot," said Mr Madhavan, CEO of the company.

Simply put, the idea is nearing the stage of being pitched to studios. Should it meet good interest and a deal be struck, another two years would be required for producing the film.

The pitch to studios has a bearing on how the film would be made - it may be distributed by one of them, part-funded or fully funded.

That is further progress from the position last March, when Mr Abhay Bhalerao, Vice-President (Corporate Strategy & Finance), merely said that Crest was discussing a couple of theatrical projects.

The company is considered to be the most advanced Indian studio for 3D animation (a majority of domestic animation companies are still in the 2D space, begging questions of consolidation).

Crest, Mr Madhavan said, is the best facility outside the US and its crop of industry heavyweights like Pixar, PDI Dreamworks, Blue Skies, Sony Image Works, Industrial Light & Magic and DNA. "Outside the US, Crest leads in digital production," he said.

Its subsidiary, RichCrest Animation, has a track record in Hollywood. The Los Angeles-based Rich Animation drifted towards Crest because its founders felt that the 2D space in which it did most of its work was set to be passé.

For example, Walt Disney, the name the world associates with classical animation, no longer maintains a 2D animation department.

Computer Generated Imaging (CGI) is only 10 years old. But it has an enviable track record in that most CGI films made money. Only early this month, news reports said that The Incredibles raked in $70.6 million in three days at the US box office. In turn, it upped the ante for Polar Express costing $150 million to make.

3D, clearly the next level of animation technology, is little different from other IT applications in that even as the action is in the US, there is cost advantage in doing part of the work elsewhere.

For Mr Richard Rich, co-founder of Rich Animation, who had previously experimented with such formulae like a network of individual animators in various continents linked by the Internet and doing work for him, Crest and its Indian base was the right answer for his studio caught at a crossroads.

Thus, all the talent required for Crest's proposed animation feature films would be in the US, backed by its access to the Indian work base.

"A typical CGI production would cost around $100 million. We can do it at one-third the cost," said Mr Madhavan, pegging the total cost of the two films at $60-80 million.

Besides feature films being the natural graduation curve for any animation company, there is another reason for Crest aspiring so.

At the end of the day, in animation, creativity is king. Which is why the industry saw instances like a small Pixar setting the terms for its relation with Walt Disney.

Investors and valuators chasing a roadmap for company growth will some day ask Crest - what have you to show? In reply, Crest needs a library of original work, its own bank of digital creativity capable of fetching income for years to come.

Currently, its library is restricted to the 2D television series, Tenali Raman, and another series called Pet Aliens, co-owned with Mike Young Productions. More is needed, without which the punch to Crest's life in animation is diluted. After all, Jerry must beat Tom for their 10 minutes of mayhem to become an animation classic.