Idol FIlm's Asad Sultan acquires Motion Capture Studio

MOVIE STUDIO IN PERAK Friday, January 22nd, 2010 13:25:00

CHENNAI: The Red Snapper (M) Sdn Bhd (TRS), Perak State Economic Development Corporation’s flagship telecommunications and animation initiative, has entered into a 70-30 joint venture with Rocking Pixels Inc.

(RPI) in India.

With a total joint investment of US$15 million (RM50.97m), the joint venture named Rocking Pixels MSC (M) Sdn Bhd (RPM), will design, build and manage a state-of-theart studio specialised in producing Hollywood- class 3D animation for TV, feature films and gaming.

The Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) was signed this morning in Chennai, India. TRS was represented by its executive chairman Rais Hussin and director Asad Sultan while Rocking Pixels Inc. was represented by it CEO Sanjit Daniel and executive director Mohit Patel.

The MoA was signed in the presence of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, Minister of International Trade & Industry Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamed and Perak Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Dr. Zambry Abdul Kadir.

“Malaysian high tech has a cultural and geographic advantage over others in establishing Indian business ventures and I am delighted at this coming together between The Red Snapper and Rocking Pixels," Rais said.

Strategically located in Perak, the studio will take advantage of skilled manpower locally as well as from India, China and the Philippines, leveraging the world class infrastructure that Malaysia provides.

“The studio will utilise the technical expertise of Rocking Pixels in areas such as Motion Capture, Realtime Rendering and VFX (Visual Effects).

Rocking Pixels Malaysia should hit a revenue of RM17.15 million in 2010 while in 2011 it is expected to hit RM85.75 million, registering a growth of almost 400 per cent" he added.

Rais said the revenues numbers is very conservative. “In fact given our partners eminent presence in this market, we are confident that the revenue numbers are well within our reach.”

Rocking Pixels Malaysia CEO Asad Sultan said that the global animation demand from a developer’s perspective is US$35 billion (RM122.5 b) with a market value of RM262.5 billion.

He said the emphasis now is on identifying competitively-cost highquality production centres. India has the fourth largest animation talent pool in the world and is poised to take advantage of this market.

Malaysia’s proximity to India, China and Philippines allows it to draw specialised talent from these places as well, making it a hub for high-quality 3D content creation.

Rocking Pixels has a long-standing developer relationship with graphics giant American Graphics Hardware Manufacturer (NVIDIA) , and are jointly developing advanced rendering technologies that leverage the massively parallel processing power of NVIDIA, (Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

The relationship enables Rocking Pixels to have early access to the latest graphics hardware, Software Development Kit (SDK) and advanced 3D graphics techniques directly from NVIDIA’s R&D team.

“With the gap between graphics and reality rapidly closing, the computational requirements to produce realistic 3D movies is growing at an astronomical pace,” Sanjit said Daniel.

Within the RM122.5 billion worldwide market for 3D animation, the studio will target bulge-bracket Hollywood markets which have seen enormous success in 3D animated films such as District 9 and Avatar.

Also on the radar is the international TV and DVD feature markets with giants like Disney, Nickelodeon as well as world-renowned producers such as Mike Young Productions and QED.