BIG Animation has launched its education wing BIG AIMS (BIG Animation Infotainment & Media School) to bridge the gap between Industry and Academia. BIG Aims will be located at the BIG Animation studio facility in Pune and will run within a designated space adjoining the studio‘s operations.
With a motto of “Crafting leaders in moving art”, BIG AIMS is committed to impart knowledge and learning that goes beyond traditional pedagogy and emphasizes on practical exposure to integrated production processes. “BIG AIMS”, will address both as a finishing school for advanced learning in animation and offer specialized courses as well.
Starting with AIMS-3D +, which is ‘Advanced Diploma in 3D Pipeline‘ as well as AIMS-D2D which is ‘Advanced Diploma in Digital 2D‘ professional, full-time one year courses, the objective will be to impart a complete understanding of the animation pipeline to the pupil.
In these courses, the student will get to learn the complete process from Idea to Script & Script to Screen. Apart from delivering the conceptual understanding, the students will also gain real-time exposure to creative and business challenges of animation. The practical exposure will be a combination of hand-holding and self-learning for a student. In addition, the Short term programs viz. AIMS-PEP (Diploma in Pre-Production), AIMS-POP (Diploma in Post-Production) as well as AIMS-SMOKE (Smoke) & AIMS-FLAME (Flame) training will be offered as ‘specialized‘ courses to the students. The time-investment for these short-term courses by specialization will range from 3 months to 6 months.
BIG Animation CEO Ashish SK shared, “The most important thing today is to create something which is a case study based specialization program. That‘s what we have been able to create at BIG AIMS, we have also kept in mind the specific needs of the industry and the present trends to design the specialization programs so that the student can work in a simulated environment. This will give an opportunity to students to get an exposure of work in a studio like situation.”
“It‘s a model that is practiced world over, when artists migrate from television to feature films. One has to go through specialized programs and those programs can only be meaningful if they are done in a simulated environment or a studio environment. That‘s where we felt that creating specialized pipelines for animated feature films, one would require to impart this knowledge to the artist who can get prepared to join the bigger projects in a much shorter time but with a higher confidence.” He added.
“As a structured policy we have we always make sure that we have about 40% freshers‘ joining, but to get them to work on a pipeline takes a big time… and many of the freshers‘ take time in deciding upon which specialized process they will get into, the finishing school will help them to identify their areas of specialization.” He further added.
Vijay Sinha, VP – HR for BIG Animation shared, “Each course will be 5 hours a day and on all weekdays. 1 batch of eachl of these courses will run simultaneously with close to 20 students per batch. The course fees will range from INR 75,000 to 1.5 lacs.”
In terms of faculty, Sinha shared that BIG AIMS currently begins with 5 Permanent faculty members with the experienced Satish Narayanan as Academic director. It will also have visiting faculty from within and outside the studio. “We will have all the experts for each of the subjects including Direction, Writing, Sound, and from each of the processes including texturing , lighting, compositing etc, the students will get to learn a lot. We also have confirmations from the likes of Vaibhav Kumaresh, Dhimant Vyas, Swanand Kirkire, Shantanou Moitra, Kamlesh Pandey to be guest lecturers and that is another USP of this initiative,” added Sinha.
“Also, the students will have access to all the learning material accumulated for the studio. And they would be exposed to state of the art infrastructure and systems, and walk in the same corridors as the experiences artists and directors and work in the same space and environment. The opportunity the students will get is to be groomed in the production, creative and corporate environments from day one. Being in such an atmosphere while learning, the student would automatically know what it takes to be in the industry and would be an asset in any studio they join from day one itself” he added.
With dedicated ten thousand square feet of space for BIG AIMS, equipped with the latest software and hardware installations comparable to the best in the world, the institute lends the advantage to its‘ students to be able to witness the professional workflow and the corporate environment alongside with their education and be more prepared and confident to kick start their career.
The institute provides a unique learning experience to the students with the following high end facilities:-
” 5.1 Dolby digital auditorium with a complete state of the art professional BARCO System for screening.
- Quad core workstations for Lab
- High end projector class rooms.
- Light Box facilities for Traditional Animation.
- Facility of using professional edit suits with non linear edit software‘s
- Fully equipped smoke set up for online edit facilities.
- Cintiq machines for digital artworks
- Hygienic 100 seat Canteen facilities
“The whole concept of BIG Aims is to provide a finishing school where people come out production ready and because it is a pre-requisite for students to have attended an animation course prior to joining the advanced courses at BIG AIMS, it is going to be very much taking the animation ecosystem along with it, conflict with none and creating seasoned animation professionals who understand the whole process and can be assets to the studios they join from day one as the main AIM of BIG AIMS.” Concluded Kulkarni.