MUMBAI: If you don't give the audience what they want, someone else will. Kids' content producers and broadcasters have figured out that Indian kids want relatable and even local characters.
The OTTV Kids and Animation Summit 2018 saw a session on the making of home-grown characters with panelists Punnaryug Artvision founder Ashish Kulkarni, Toonz Media Group content alliance and partnerships SAARC Kishor Srivastav, Green Gold Animation chief strategy officer Srinivas Chilakalapudi, Graphiti Multimedia director and COO Munjal Shroff and Sony Yay head of programming Ronojoy Chakraborty. Dveo Media CEO Deepak Ramsurrun moderated the panel.
Highlighting more about the making of home-grown characters, Shroff said that it should keep kids engaged and enable them to dream about it. Adding to Shroff’s point, Kulkarni said that when he started, he had to look at the heritage characters as they didn’t have the liberty to use those projects in other countries because they didn’t have the support from government to produce original content. "There was support for content services but not for content creation. The challenge here is that we are struggling with budgets to create our original content. When you create a character, there are certain things to be taken into consideration. First is that kids don’t understand sequel. Second is that kids would like to see the same character that they relate to. So when you touch upon the heritage, you cannot create 150 episodes of repetitions. The start, middle and end of the story should be in that 11-22 minute episode and they should be able to find themselves inside the characters.”
Commenting on the same, Srivastav said that while creating original content, we need to see the channel’s feedback and proper research is to be conducted on industry trends and need gap. He added, “We consider the steal character while making an original content, which means, how the character speaks, what they wear and what effect they have on their storyline and background of the character is also important.”
Chakraborty chipped in saying that according to their research kids love remote control cars and that is why they came up with a show named Kicko and Super Speedo. He said that they also found out that that kids love funky hairstyles, clothes etc.
When asked about the aspects being considered while making a localised show, Kulkarni said people need to find new content. One should look at the economics, which plays a major role. The key to animation content is powerful idea, powerful character and the ability to tell hundreds of stories in the same plot.
“I have never sold my IPs to anyone till date; I only gave licensing rights to the channels. So it depends how you want to do it and why you want to do it. If you are selling the IPs, there’s a lot of creative people tampering with the content around. The dilemma that we have with this country and the struggle that we are facing since the last decade is that the price gaps of 22 minutes caps around Rs 12 lakh or Rs 20-25 lakh and that is the challenge to build quality content," he said.
Only if people are willing to fund animation will we see a future where Indian content is making waves abroad.
