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Published on October 9, 2007

 For most contest winners, trips to foreign countries involve plenty of sightseeing and shopping. The six students who walked off with the top prizes in the recent AACP Thailand Animation Contest spent their seven days in Japan in a very different way, dividing their time between a university campus and an animation company, and marvelling at the very latest in digital technology.

Travelling with a group of academics from the National Electronic and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) and Thai universities, the two student teams had a rare opportunity to see firsthand the animation laboratories at an Osaka university and discuss their winning projects with lecturers, professionals and fellow students. They also quickly learned - not without a tinge of envy - that Japanese corporate education offers far better facilities than its Thai equivalent.

Some 268 projects were submitted to Ayudhya Alliance CP Insurance's Animation Contest on the theme of global warming.

Atippatai Suwan and two friends from Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi won the undergraduate competition for "Final Warning". At the high-school level, three students from Khon Kaen's Kaennakorn Witaylai won for their work "Hope".

Atippatai was overawed by his tour of Osaka Electro-Communication University.

"The Japanese students are so lucky to study in such a great atmosphere. They're surrounded by plenty of high technology and they also get to work closely with professionals before they even graduate."

The university incorporates a motion-capture studio worth ¥60 million (Bt16 million), owned and operated by Digital Media Lab Inc. The studio, which is overseen by professionals and creates both video games and pachinko (the pinball-like Japanese game), allows students to work as staff, offering them a useful introduction to real-life business.

The Department of Digital Animation and Digital Games has an annual student intake of more than 100 but even with a fully equipped classroom, the university admits that only a few will develop the skills to work with the leading Japanese game or animation companies. That's no reason to skimp on investments though, and the university regularly updates its PC and Mac computers, sound studio and play-station labs for students to test their game projects, and also upgrades the software every year.

"It's my dream classroom. We have nothing like it in a Thai university," sighs Atippatai.

Perhaps that's why the Japanese animation students were so admiring of Atippatai and his friends when they discovered the team had done everything for his project - from finding the animation programme to composing the soundtrack and the dubbing - by using only the older software and hardware available to them.

"The university provides everything for them so I guess they feel they'd be unable to do it if they had the same lack of resources as we do," he says.

The animation classes taught at Osaka focus on commercials, feature films and also video games. Most Japanese universities offer visual arts degree courses with specialisations in animation and video games to serve the nation's ever-growing industry.

Here in Thailand, only a few study programmes are available, namely the Computer Game and Multimedia Major at Rangsit University's Faculty of Information Technology and the animation major at Chiang Mai University's College of Arts Media and Technology.

But Nectec academic Dr Virat Sornlertlamvainch points out that animation and game study were only recently upgraded to university from vocational school level. He adds that last month's trip by Thai academics should increase cooperation with Japanese universities.

"In Thailand, video and computer games are still considered an evil by parents, a bit like villains their children have to be protected from. Yet they're still gaining in popularity.

"We need to use the Thai obsession with technology in a profitable way by letting our people create their own games and animation rather than allowing all the money to go to foreign game companies," he says.

"I believe our kids have the talent to create original works. What we have to figure out is how create the opportunities."

Atippatai agrees. He says that creating his own game and characters offer far better challenges than being a player.

"It's like we rule the game: it's fun being able to control the characters' abilities and also the game's directions.

"What we have learned from this trip is that we need to find our own signature in our work. That's essential if we want to pursue a career in animation," says Atippatai. Along with his friends, he recently founded the company Creative Max to do exactly that.

Parinyaporn Pajee

 The Nation