Hasta La Motion!

Since the inception of gaming industry the success of game development was acknowledge through the game’s popularity and its sales. One of the key factors which helps in the success of a property is advertising revenue. There are various types of advertisements, considering today’s market visual campaigns impact more on audience and it results to profitable business. Today maximum smartphone users are consuming content online and it has opened opportunities for video ad campaigns as it engages even the laziest buyers.

Video marketing can capture a wide audience, and it works on many levels and there are no exceptions for gaming business. In conversation with Animationxpress, Pokkt co-founder and COO Vaibhav Odhekar expressed how their mobile ad platform helping game developers to reach their monetisation goals. Here is the excerpt:

Could you share a brief about POKKT?

POKKT is a leading mobile video ad platform driven by big data and artificial intelligence. It’s number one in APAC, Japan and Mena for brand video ads in mobile gaming. It has 700 mn+ registered devices and 30 bn+ ad requested per month on the POKKT platform. 85 members strong team across 7 countries.

How POKKT helps game developers?

POKKT brings a powerful Ad SDK that helps monetise non-paying users using a highly evolved monetisation platform built around the gaming ecosystem.

How does POKKT promote a brand in a game?

By Integrating POKKT’s SDK (software development kit), developers in the district can monetise their non-paying clients and expand eCPMs (effective cost per mille) through being targeted on brand video Ads inside their apps.

What is the ad revenue percentage a developer receives utilising the platform?

For a developer, POKKT is a specialised brand advertising platform. Since most other ad-networks show “app install” videos, there is an inherent fear that their users would move away to the new app that is being promoted. So there is a feeling of “safe” “brand” ads that POKKT shows.

How it is different from Google ads program for the developer?

Google and other ad platforms are looked at as a “high fill rate, low cpm” partner. Basically back fill all the inventory.
POKKT is looked at as a “high rate, low fill” premium monetising partner.

What are the procedures for collaboration?

POKKT has an open SDK that can be downloaded from the site. There is a comprehensive Wiki document that gives a step by step guide about how to integrate the SDK and more . So technically it’s very standard and straight forward.

We focus on working with the developer and be his guide towards monetisation. We have a team, which largely consists of ex-game developers / publishers, who understand the ecosystem really well.

Once the value proposition is clear, we do a commercial discussion and start working together.

What are the challenges you have faced in the Indian gaming industry?

• Today the only model for successful games in the app ecosystem is freemium.
• However, games on a standalone basis, cannot survive by just ad revenues. In-app purchases or users paying has to kick in. The industry today has resolved infrastructure challenges, which hitherto was the biggest challenge. We now need to fix the monetisation challenge.
• The biggest trap a publisher faces is, he / she is hesitant to spend marketing dollars for user acquisition, if he is unsure that the user will eventually pay, making return on investment (ROI) as the biggest question .
• This doesn’t mean, the core issue of content isn’t important. We definitely need international quality content to come from the domestic developers. User today is exposed to global gaming content, so compromise there isn’t acceptable.
• In my opinion, everything else (user acquisition models, funding, retention and more) is resolved / at least templatised. There are set methods to be followed.
• Content and monetisation are the two big challenges.

What usually brand marketers aim to receive after the campaign.

Typically they would expect report highlighting the below:
o Impressions
o Unique users
o Completed views (for videos)
o Click through rate (CTR)
Up the curve advertisers also measure:
o Viewability
o In-Target
o All numbers reported daily for the duration of the campaign.

What are the changes in the ad revenue you have witnessed in 2019?

We have seen good growth in revenue / ad-spends on POKKT. We also believe a lot of it is because POKKT focuses on
o Mobile In-app
o Video
o Gaming
These three have been the growth drivers for the industry as a whole. POKKT being positioned to focus on all these three, probably helped.

What is your goal for 2020?

We would like to maintain our revenue growth trajectory. We are investing a lot behind our machine learning (ML) and analytics engine. We hope this product will mature significantly this year. We would like to open two more countries / geographies this year.

The post Monetisation in mobile games – POKKT’s perspective appeared first on AnimationXpress.

Disney theme parks will see almost a dozen new offerings at various locations. Tokyo Disneyland will see a major expansion, Disneyland Resort in California will have a new Marvel-themed land and there will be Disney’s first ever Mickey Mouse ride at Walt Disney World. Here are a few attractions we found interesting:

Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway

The first moving attraction at Disney World to ever feature Mickey and Minnie Mouse will open in the Chinese Theater at Disney’s Hollywood Studios on 4 March 2020. Visitors will start out by watching a new Mickey and Minnie cartoon short and then board the train to become a part of the cartoon.

Disney’s Riviera Resort

The property is located on the new Skyliner gondola route, and guests staying in the 300 rooms at this new resort will have easy access to both Epcot and Hollywood Studios. Since Riviera is a Disney Vacation Club resort, you have the option of booking a room with cash or renting Disney Vacation Club points and potentially saving a bunch of money off the regular room rates.

Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure

Summer 2020 will bring Chef Remy’s kitchen antics to the France pavilion in Epcot. This trackless ride already exists at Disneyland Paris, but this will be its debut in the U.S. Expect to “shrink” down to the size of the rat as you scurry around Chef Gusteau’s kitchen.

Beauty and the Beast sing-a-long

In January 2020, the France pavilion in the World Showcase will open a new Beauty and the Beast sing along. This film will alternate showings with the current film, Impressions de France, beginning 17 January.

Space 220 restaurant at Epcot

If you want to dine 220 miles above earth, head toward Mission Space in Epcot, as Space 220 is scheduled to open near that attraction in early 2020. With a “space elevator” to take you up, Space 220 will be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Toy Story Land Round-Up Rodeo BBQ

This new table-service restaurant will be surrounded by larger-than-life toys, just like in the rest of Toy Story Land. The dining rodeo is expected to start in 2020.

If you are not planning to spend your day at the crowded attractions, the new virtual queue that is being used for the Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance attraction seems to be working, and maybe that becomes the new standard for attractions.

The post What’s coming to Disney theme parks in 2020? appeared first on AnimationXpress.

Just a few weeks ago at Unite India 2019, Toonz Animation Studios gave a talk providing a comparison on how they saved time and effort during their production process when using Unity versus their traditional render pipeline. The conclusion was that they saw a 70 per cent reduction in human effort and 95 per cent reduction in machine-hours spent. 

This is not a one-off realization. More and more animation/film studios, especially in India, are beginning to realize the power of Unity for they are no longer waiting for any render farm to see what their content looks like. They are making changes to things like characters, lighting, and camera positions as they work, and they are seeing the content in context – all the time. This is the future of filmmaking.

Retrospect

It was three years ago when the Unity Graphics team released Adam, an animated short film made entirely in real time. It was also around the same time when MPC (Moving Picture Company, a subsidiary of Technicolor) used Unity to create tools for pre-visualisation for Disney’s Jungle Book. These two projects really woke people up to the potential to produce animated content and film using Unity.

In the meantime, Unity was also beginning to push the limits of real-time graphics. Book of the Dead (2018) made by Unity’s Demo Team in Stockholm, showcased the capabilities of Unity for powering high-end visuals for productions. It introduced the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) which gives developers total control of the renderer and makes it easier to achieve high-end visuals on Unity

Since then Unity has added more capabilities to it’s engine to help scale production so that large teams can work on a production together. In 2018, MPC developed Genesis, a set of tools that helped The Lion King crew during the production visualisation process to take a camera — or rather, something representing a camera —  and physically move it around the stage. In parallel, Disney Television Animation announced Baymax Dreams, a series of three broadcast shorts which were rendered completely with Unity. They closely tracked the production and currently found 2X productivity gains compared to their traditional workflow.

The adoption of Unity as an animation/film engine has since picked up speed. For example, Bwater studios’ Treasure Trekkers used Unity purely to render the background, Sonder, an award winning short film made by a team 135 people from 7 countries used Unity to render out their entire film. Even Lexus shot an entire broadcast quality commercial for their LC500 car.

Beyond this, in India, in addition to the animated/film content produced by studios like Toonz Animation, CultureMachine and VideoGyan we are also working with a number of film/animation studios behind the scenes which we hope to publicise as well.

Learnings 

Real-time filmmaking is taking the industry by storm, giving directors and studios unprecedented artistic freedom in half the time of traditional workflows. That said, we constantly listen to our users and get their feedback to keep improving the production process. We have learned that:

1. For 3D Rendered episodic content real-time rendering is good or better than offline rendering techniques. 
2. Developers tended to work in smaller groups due to faster iteration time. This has resulted in a gain in creativity and productivity. 
3. Directors/Developers get more control on what they do because they instantly see what they are envisioning.
4. There is a learning phase that is necessary since real-time rendering is quite different from offline rendering techniques. 
5. Ability to seamlessly exchange data from/to digital content creation tools such as Maya is critical. Plugins such as Unity Japan’s MeshSync and FBX Roundtripping are invaluable. 
6. Formats and standards such as USD, MaterialX, OpenSubDiv are converging and more work needs to be done on both Unity and on the studios’ side. 
7. Unity has unlocked many possibilities to explore and develop productions. Technologies such as virtual production, motion capture, live streaming, AR Walls, realtime raytracing and photogrammetry are some of the techniques that are becoming common during production. 

What’s coming?

Python Scripting 

The Python scripting language is a de facto standard for workflow scripting in the CG ecosystem, and provides a single point of entry to data preparation, asset management, scene and sequence construction, user interface, and offline rendering. Now users can leverage the power of their existing Python codebase with Unity. 

Project management with Shotgun

Shotgun Software, an Autodesk company, provides essential business tools for managers and visual collaboration tools for artists and supervisors. With Unity’s Shotgun Toolkit integration, artists can launch the Unity Editor directly from Shotgun,  as well as load assets, animation and caches. Artists can also publish new Shotgun versions from inside the Unity Editor, using the same familiar Shotgun Toolkit UI. This kind of bridge enables project managers to integrate the full power of real-time into their existing pipeline.

Live link and Mesh Sync

It is a tool that reflects the editing of the model on the DCC tool to Unity in real time. It enables artists to model while checking what it looks like in Unity. It works as a plugin for both Unity and DCC tools and currently supports Maya , Maya LT , 3ds Max , Blender , Metasequoia , and xismo .

Recorder with Arbitrary Output Values

The Unity AOV Recorder allows Unity Recorder to record AOV (Arbitrary Output Variables) using High Definition Render Pipeline. For example, developers can record Normal or Depth render passes to composite them. Or record an Alpha matte to isolate a part of the rendered image in another DCC tool.

Conclusion 

Historically, there have been too many unnecessary barriers to creating CG content, whether due to technical limitations in hardware, the difficulty of changing highly customized pipelines and workflows already optimized over many years, or lack of organizational flexibility to try out alternative solutions. Fortunately, we have reached an unprecedented stage of technological advancement where anyone, anywhere can create this content without the slow, laborious, and often intimidating challenges of offline processes. The only barrier now is learning what this shift means for your studio—and the willingness to make the leap.

(This article has been contributed by Unity Technologies head of technology (Indian subcontinent) Arvind Neelakantan and AnimationXpress does not necessarily subscribe to these views.)

The post Guest Column | Retrospecting the year and what lies ahead! appeared first on AnimationXpress.

It’s a new year and Disney has already started revealing its presents planned for Disney+ in 2020. And WandaVision has got a new release date! 

In a recent highlight reel of 2020 releases, Marvel has announced that WandaVision will be debuting in 2020, instead of 2021 as previously reported.

WandaVision joins The Falcon and The Winter Soldier as the second Marvel show appearing this year. It’s expected that these shows will be released by November or December. Nothing more has been revealed about them yet from the makers except from the sneak peek in the reel.

WandaVision is one of the much awaited and mysterious projects in the works for Marvel’s Disney+ slate. Kevin Feige has earlier revealed that it will take on after Avengers: Endgame. Fans are now left wondering how will Vision get back his life as he wasn’t resurrected as part of the “reverse snap.”

Marvel Comics already has a number of potential Vision/Scarlet Witch storylines from that could be drawn from to make this series. But it’ll be a thing to watch how Disney+ will connect WandaVision into the larger MCU, as reportedly things from this series will eventually tie into the next Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness where Scarlet Witch appears in.

WandaVision is supposedly going to be six episodes long, and it’s not yet clear if it’s going to be a miniseries like Loki or a longer one. Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Oslen will be reprising their roles as the superhero couple.

Apart from The Falcon and The Winter Soldier and WandaVision, The Mandalorian season 2 will probably keep fans waiting until fall 2020 at the earliest, keeping at least a nine month gap with only Clone Wars to fill it.

The post ‘WandaVision’ to release in 2020, a year earlier! appeared first on AnimationXpress.

Spies in Disguise, a CG comedy opened in 3,500 screens domestically. In the first opening five-day frame, the movie is projected to pull in something in the range of $20 million.

Spies in Disguise comes from Blue Sky, the studio best known for Ice Age and Rio franchises. None of its films outside those franchises has taken more than $300 million at the global box office. Its last offering, Ferdinand, opened in December 2017 (also against a Star Wars film), and took $13.4 million in its first three days on its way to $84.4 million domestic. The film performed well abroad pulling in an additional $211M from international plays.

The movie is directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, produced by Blue Sky Studios and distributed by 20th Century Fox. Based on Lucas Martell’s 2009 animated short Pigeon: Impossible, the movie features Will Smith and Tom Holland, alongside Rashida Jones, Ben Mendelsohn, Reba McEntire, Rachel Brosnahan, Karen Gillan, DJ Khaled, and Masi Oka in the supporting roles.

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