Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, Pune…..That’s not all!
Besides growing as an industry and community, animation production is also spreading into other Indian towns and cities, and one can be sure that as this happens, a great amount of variety in terms of regional concepts and styles will spring forth.
The latest news with Animation ‘xpress is that Sangli based Oxygen Animation Studio is working on developing two projects in Marathi for children. These include Nach Re Mora, a musical album in Marathi featuring six flash animated songs with hand sketched water colored backgrounds and Shastratalya Gamti – Jamti’, which deals with various concepts of science in a 2D animated story form.
Oxygen Animation Studios Creative Director Dhananjay Wagh shared, “We have been into educational publishing for the past 15 years. For the past five years we have also been an Arena Multimedia franchisee in Sangli. The synergy between our two competencies that is education and animation is a logical extension. Using animation makes teaching as well as learning simpler, effective and more exciting where children can be educated and entertained at the same time.”
Priced at Rs 99/- Nach Re Mora is scheduled for an August launch with an initial consignment of 5000 SKUs. A team of eight artists has worked on the project which began in April 2006 and will be complete by July end. Dhanajay Publications, Wagh’s publishing company will use its 320 strong distributor base to distribute the album throughout Maharashtra.
Besides the title track, other tracks include, Russu Bai Russu, Mamache Gavala Jau Ya, and a couple of Bud bud Geet. Sung by local artists, each track is approximately three minutes and revolves around various themes which are centered on the lives of five children who feature in all the songs. The background score is composed by music director & composer Dr Dutta Kumbhar.The other project ‘Shastratlya Gamti – Jamti’ features an animated Gurukul where the students live with their Guru who teaches them about various concepts and phenomena. Each CD will feature once concept whose explanation will be broken into four components. Oxygen plans to complete 2 titles by October. For this product the studio, besides tapping into its own distributor network will also indulge in direct marketing activity with schools across Maharashtra.