In my last article I had implored upon the need to sustain the buzz created by animation and to face up to the challenges in order to do so. We wanted to grow and elevate the status of the animation industry to transform it into an engine of growth for this country.

Over time we have moved considerably in that direction and have done our bit to achieve these objectives. Let me list here for your benefit the progress report.

In order to achieve this herculean task we decided to internalize the findings and started with upgrading our internal processes and systems to make them leak proof and strong enough to bear the load of hard work that was to follow. So we decided to upgrade our ISO certification and selected DNV Det Norske as the body to certify and upgrade our ISO 9001:2000 certification.

We re-engineered our processes and system with their recommendations and singled out Academics as departments for total re-vamp.

Re-vamping academics was a difficult task since we are governed by the requirements prescribed by our Franchisor, Aptech Ltd. So we decided to catch the bull by the horn. We doggedly pursued with Aptech Ltd. to change the course curriculum and make it more in line with the requirements of the animation industry and teach it as per the norms of our HAT Methodology. Our persistence paid rich dividends and we were finally able to force our principals into launching the Animation-Pro program which is appropriately tailored to meet the above requirements. Needless to say that as usual, they accepted most of our recommendations.

The next step was to take a hard look at our team of trainers who were expected to deliver this new program. We wanted faculties who fulfilled at least these basic criteria:

• At least some experience in the animation industry
• Art and sketching background
• Experience in animation film making
• Specialisation in at least one area of animation production pipeline

This led to a lot of soul searching which resulted in a hurricane of activity and in the calm which followed the storm we were left with a bunch of faculties who were quite different from those whom we started with, but those who fulfilled all the above criteria and are much better prepared to deliver the requirements of the new program.

The next step was to make these trainers unlearn whatever they knew and re-learn animation from the perspective of teaching it to our students so that they are placement ready at the end of the curriculum and in order to do so we made our faculties undergo a series of training programs which were designed to strengthen the design visualisation, pre and post production aspects of their repertoire.

So much so that we even made each of our faculties make an animation short film which would be showcased in our annual CG exhibition Drishti 2009 in May.

The next step in re-enforcing the department was an influx of a lot of animation film making as a team with the students using not only software but also the various alternate forms of animation like sand, clay and even paper. The results are here for you to see in our showcase section.

Needless to say that we won two awards for the Best Film and Best Character design in Creative Minds the inter Arena CG competition held every year in January.

I am proud to say that our students today are free from the clutches of software and are concentrating on animation film making. They are thinking story, character, screenplay, dialogues, story board, editing etc. in place of 3D Max, Maya, Photoshop ...

If we can continue to sustain this buzz and mould our students into making this approach a habit rather than effort, we would have done our job and placing them in good jobs would be the least of our problems!