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WORLD  Jadoo Works Studio To Produce Krishna Animation Series BY JAN BRZEZINSKI USA, Feb 27 (VNN) — Based on Thomas Friedman "What goes around" (New York Times, 2004-02-26) Indian animation with its rich myriad tales of mythological and folklore scripts is finding favor in the Western market. Recently Hyderabad based Padmalaya studios bagged a major contract for Jataka Tales and Jadoo works Studio based in Bangalore is working on an animation project based on the life story on Krishna. There is definitely a market for original content and India is emerging as an animation hub with many studios proliferating in the last five to six years. Toonz which completed three years of its operations is definitely proving to be one of the brightest sparks in the animation sectors in India. In fact, a lot of the Saturday morning cartoons children watch in America are now being drawn by Indian animators like JadooWorks, founded three years ago in Bangalore. The sophisticated, and more lucrative, preproduction, finishing and marketing of the animated films remains in America. Indian animation companies took the business away from the other Asians by proving to be more adept at both the hand-drawing of characters and the digital painting of each frame by computer ÷ at a lower price. Indian artists have two advantages, explains Ashish Kulkarni, C.O.O. of JadooWorks. "They speak English, so they can take instruction from the American directors easily, and they are comfortable doing coloring digitally." India has an abundance of traditional artists, who have been able to make the transition easily to computerized digital painting. Most of these artists are the children of Hindu temple sculptors and painters. Explains Mr. Kulkarni: "We train them to transform their traditional skills to animation in a digital format." But to keep up their traditional Indian painting skills, JadooWorks has a room set aside ÷ because the two skills reinforce each other. In short, thanks to globalization, a whole new generation of Indian traditional artists can keep up their craft rather than drive taxis to earn a living. But here's where the story really gets interesting. JadooWorks has decided to produce its own animated epic about the childhood of Krishna. To write the script, though, it wanted the best storyteller it could find and outsourced the project to an Emmy Award-winning U.S. animation writer, Jeffrey Scott ÷ for an Indian epic! "We are also doing all the voices with American actors in Los Angeles," says Mr. Kulkarni. And the music is being written in London. JadooWorks also creates computer games for the global market but outsources all the design concepts to U.S. and British game designers. All the computers and animation software at JadooWorks have also been imported from America (H.P. and I.B.M.) or Canada, and half the staff walk around in American-branded clothing. Contact VNN about this story  Send this story to a friend
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