THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The country's first exclusive export zone, catering to the burgeoning opportunity in computer animation, is about to come up on the outskirts of the capital of Kerala.

The Commerce Ministry is known to have okayed in principle the creation of a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of 25 acres within the Film and Video Park (FV Park) set up by the Kerala Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (KINFRA) at Kazhakutttam, 20 km from here.

On the sidelines of a workshop on digital film making, KINFRA Managing Director A. S. Suresh Babu told The Hindu that the Board for Approval for SEZ, meeting last week in Delhi, took note of Kerala's proactive promotion of techno commercial opportunities in the film and video business.

The KINFRA FV Park, spread over 75 acres, houses many state-of-the-art facilities in film processing, digital sound recording and post-production. Head start

The new animation export zone will have a head start because the State Government had created a 15,000 sq.m. animation facility, which would be ready within weeks to receive animation software houses planning to make this their base.

KINFRA is now scouting for a private partner to help take the Animation SEZ to fruition.

This is likely to be a condition of the formal sanction to follow.

The FV Park is seeing a rapid build-up: the Chennai-based Prasad Labs has made this its main plant to process all Malayalam films for two years now.

Actor Mohanlal had recently opened his own high-tech sound studio and the Kerala-based DC Books group would start a Media School by October, Mr. Babu said.

Academy's initiative

The Kerala State Chalachitra Academy has formulated its own initiative to keep the film craft alive in the State. Chairman and film director T.K. Rajeev Kumar, said the academy planned to host in November a festival of short films made by school and college students.

Scholarships

It would also offer scholarships to budding student film-makers to support their training for a year.

Nearly 70 students took part in last week's digital film-making workshop, conducted by documentary filmmaker Rajah Balakrishnan, Director of Cinema and TV at the Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi .

The National Association of Software and Service Companies, (NASSCOM), in its annual Animation Industry Report for 2005, had estimated the earnings by Indian companies in the previous year at between $ 200 million and 300 million and suggested that the figure could well be 3 billion if only proper infrastructure existed.

This may well have prompted the Central Government to sanction its first animation-specific park in a State that had readied its roadmap in this convergence area of Information Technology and cinema.

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