The first 3-D stereoscopic animation feature film from India,Alpha and Omega,that released in about 2,600 theatres in the US recently,has a Pune connection,which may open up new links with studios in the US and Europe. Indias fastest supercomputer Eka of the Computational Research Laboratories (CRL),Pune,did the stereoscopic rendering work of the film using its remote rendering cloud solution. CRL is now getting ready to offer its expertise to Hollywood films and are in talks with studios in Europe and US. A. K. Madhavan,CEO,Crest Animation Studios that produced the film,said it usually takes about four to five years to complete an animation movie and production cost may vary between $80-200 million. But due to our tie-up with CRL,we were able to complete the entire sequence in three years at half the cost. The stereoscopic rendering was completed in six months. We will release the film in Canada,UK,Singapore and Malaysia in October. In India,we are looking for a distributor and are planning a Diwali release, said Madhavan. He said rendering is a compute-intensive process and tends to be very time consuming and costly. With our own infrastructure,it looked tough to manage the release schedule of September 2010. With CRLs infrastructure,it was possible to take the movie to the Cannes Film Festival in May,2010 and it was released in 2,600 screens in the US on September 17. CRLs strong expertise in delivering on demand high-performance computing made it possible, he added. A team of 30 artistes from Crest operated from Mumbai with eight CRL engineers in Pune for the rendering work. Using our remote rendering cloud solution,infrastructure will no longer be a constraint in the ability of Indian studios to think big and make their mark around the globe. Small and medium studios can now take much larger projects without worrying about investing in costly rendering hardware solutions, said Vipin Chaudhary,CEO,CRL. He said CRL is seeing this as a revenue-making stream and is in talks with studios in India and abroad.
