Hush-hush art

Absolutely funny cartoons and those awesome scenes of action on screen actually mean a lot of hard work. Here's a peep into this animated world, shrouded in security that 007 would find difficult to crack.

Raja Simhan T.E.

IMAGINE working in a place where your desktop computer restricts external access. No personal e-mail. No Internet. You work on a single platform, but on various projects, throughout the day. You are restricted from communicating with outsiders on what is happening inside the campus.

Sounds like a high-security prison? Nah! This is inside Pentamedia Graphics Ltd, the Chennai-based animation and special effects software firm. The company is a one-stop shop for solutions in multimedia with output in film, video, CD or the Internet.

``It may sound bizarre. But we need to take such precautions, giving no room for our competitors to know what we are doing. The other important reason for not having e-mail and the Internet is to prevent employees from getting distracted from work,'' says N.S. Riyaz Babu, Business Unit Manager, 3D Animation Studio, Pentamedia.

Technology may play a vital role in animation, but it is only secondary. It is the people, the creators of characters, who are the pillars of the industry.

When e-mail made inroads a couple of years ago, many companies restricted its use within the office. The reason? In some cases, employees spent more time on e-mail than work. However, in today's Internet age, e-mail has become a necessity, with companies seeing it as a good communications tool. But not at Pentamedia Graphics.

Employees need to concentrate on what they are supposed to do. With facilities such as e-mail and the Internet, employees could get distracted easily, the entire project could be affected, and the company could end up making bad projects, Babu says. Further, there is always the possibility of data leak, he says.

In the US, most technology-dependent businesses ask employees to sign strict confidentiality agreements. However, animation companies go the extra mile. They even restrict long-distance telephone, limit Internet access and, occasionally, forbid communication between employees working on the same project.

Says Babu, ``in the entire six-floor complex of Pentamedia in the city, we have only three terminals with Internet connections, which are, however, password-protected. The terminals, restricted to business heads, are not connected with each other and have separate mail servers, for security reasons.''

Pentamedia's Chennai facility houses the 2D, 3D, SFX and post-production studios. The company's Digital Imaging Center (PDIC), the nerve centre for all the multimedia activities of Pentamedia, is located in Chennai's outskirts, at Kelambakkam.

The centre, claimed to be the first of its kind in Asia and the fourth such in the world, houses the authorised studio training centre of Silicon Studio Inc, (a subsidiary of Silicon Graphics Inc, US) and the developer extension university-cum-development centre of Apple Computers Inc.

The centre specialises in 2D and 3D animation for features, television serials, game development, virtual worlds, theme parks, commercials, industrial visualisation, product modelling, ink and paint, compositing, retouching, mask painting, motion capture, 3D scanning and digitising and rendering.

According to Babu, Pentamedia employs over 1,000 animators for 2D animation and over 500 animators for 3D animation. The company has disabled all the peripherals in the machines and the employees need to work only on animation-related projects. The security within the offices is so rigid that smuggling data from systems is impossible. There is security at various levels, and there is no way data can be sent out of the office.

Further, the capacity of the systems has been restricted. All the drives are internally locked. This is to restrict employees from misusing the systems, storing a lot of data and animation projects, he says. The storage size in the system is restricted to 512 kbps, and individual expansion is curbed. With a 512-kbps capacity, only games files or less than that can be stored. If a file is attached and tried to be sent out, a warning sounds in the main server, and action is taken immediately, he says.

While beta testing a project, the capacity of that particular terminal would be increased temporarily. This is the level of security within the office. ``In the past, we had to take action against a couple of employees who tried to take data out,'' he says.

In the US, the animation hub of the world, competition is severe and security stringent within the office. Often, an employee would not know what his colleague was working on. In India, however, since there are few animation players, stealing data would not be of use to anybody. But Pentamedia is taking no chances and will continue to invest in security, he says.

The company will soon have a single FTP for the whole operations division. Further, the new master network will keep track of everything that happens in the office, and each terminal will be monitored separately. Also, there will be a centralised storage system, with all the terminals linked to it, he says.

In animation, the most important aspect for the animator is crafting the right facial expression for a character. One can create a number of other physical similarities, but not the facial expression. This is where technique comes in and Pentamedia uses some of the latest technology, which its competitors do not have, he says.

The facial expression cannot be replicated by competitors. The company also ensures copyright protection for its models. The only option outsiders will have is to modify the face, and give it a different look, he says.

The company has invested around Rs 20 lakh on each terminal. And for some machines with special effects and software, the cost could be around Rs 1 crore per terminal, he says.