CHENNAI: Chennai seems to be attracting computer animation professionals from the West like a magnet.

Andrew Daffy, whose credits include Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban, the hit TV series such as Walking with Dinosaurs and some award-winning commercials, on Wednesday joined the list, when he addressed a seminar for animation students in the city, jointly organised by PC graphics hardware giant, Nvidia and Maya Academy of Advanced Cinematics.

In a chat with the media just before his lecture, Andrew Daffy said the field of animation covered a wide range of specialities and said it would do the aspirants good if they knew exactly what they wanted to do.

Of course, there was no secret formula to that and the better way to arrive at a conclusion would be to study the basic concepts and specialise in what they were most comfortable in.

Though the British animator said that he was not aware of the trends in the outsourced animation industry in India, he was in China recently and had seen considerable improvement in productions by animation studios there.

He believed ultimately the countries vying for a piece of the outsourcing pie would need to improve the quality of their work.

Starting young

Andie started animating on his home PC at a very young age.

"I was inspired by the movie Clash of the Titans and was perhaps the first generation of animators, who were able to animate using home computers. I must have been 15 when I started." After a career with Framestore CFC, one of the largest animation and visual effects studios in Europe, he has now set up a school in London focusing on training in "photo-realistic" animation.

Laura S. Dohrmann, worldwide marketing manager — digital film, said the Nvidia lecture series will be a continuing affair and said they would be getting one acclaimed animator every month over the year to speak to the aspirants.

In case you are wondering what Nvidia has to gain with all of this, the company's quadro graphics cards are the most used PC add-on cards in the animation industry.

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