Global Creative And Media Agency - Connecting Creativity!

Malaysia – Offers Excellent State-of-the-Art Infrastructures and Technologies for the World

Over the past few years, the Malaysian Government and its Malaysian producers have re-engineered their creative process to address demand in an emerging segment by going through the inevitable process of upgrading and building the state-of-the-art infrastructure for world-class content development in order to face the fast developing High Definition digital content market.

In 2009, MSC Malaysia Status Company – KRU Studio successfully created a US$ 20 million High Definition film, TV and advertising production studio in Cyberjaya, Malaysia. The 15 acre production and post-production facility at the government-owned Cyberjaya site will feature two sound stages of 10,000 square feet and 2,500 square feet, respectively, color grading and sound mixing suites and 3D animation & visual effects facilities. KRU Studios and other foreign & local producers could now rely on a new affordable and state-of-the-art mega studio complex to create a slate of motion pictures for the domestic and international markets.

Complementing the KRU Studios also saw the grand opening of the FINAS Digital Mix Stage Studio in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The US$ 15 million world-class facility is equipped with the latest High Definition standards with Dolby Digital 5.1 and 6.1, mix stage studio, audio dubbing room, audio sweeting room, foley and optical sound camera.

Most recently in 2010, IBM and MDeC jointly developed the MSC Malaysia Animation & Creative Content Center (MAC3) Rendering Farm, a rendering cloud infrastructure comprising of IBM's innovative hardware, software and cloud computing & consulting services. Boasting computing prowess of some 120 high performance servers, coupled with the latest IBM rendering software and an animation cloud with high throughput broadband connections, the Rendering Farm is acclaimed to be the most advanced in the country and the first public animation cloud centre in ASEAN. Completed in April 2010, the facility will enable real-time testing and perform rendering jobs up to eight times faster compared to rendering on a local workstation to produce animation, games and visual effects.

Malaysia, fast-recognised as the Centre of digital creative excellence for progressive society and nation, now can proudly say that it has a friendly and complete conducive environment to facilitate industry needs in terms of strong infrastructures, facilities and initiatives, in addition to talent, funding and awareness of opportunities. Malaysia is now ready to support the growing demand for a High Definition and 3D stereoscopic content creation process. It also aims to support the production of feature films, games, animation and visual effects projects from Government grant recipients, as well as to support the growth of the local creative companies in the efforts to move faster towards attaining global recognition in terms of creativity as well as both capability and capacity for international content creation and digitisation.

Thus, the Malaysian digital content industry is also looking at content formats that were specifically structured for new media as against traditional TV. Digital Rights Management is becoming an increasingly critical aspect in the way content is being served out. Today, many Malaysian companies like Worldwide Rights Corporation and NetCarbon are already keeping in mind multiple platforms and other emerging social networking media trends, such as Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace and YouTube for its distribution and its promotion of programming. As seen worldwide, the increasing bandwidth on the mobile and web space via broadband on an iPhone, iPad, Blackberry or any Smartphone device is also making rich content experiences on these platforms a fairly attractive proposition.

On the other hand, more and more animated features predominately those in the Hollywood are being produced to be viewable in 3D stereoscopic. KRU Studios, Tripod Entertainment, Creative Media Lab and Backbone Entertainment are some of the local companies who are already in the initial stages of embarking on a 3D stereoscopic co-production with foreign partnerships in the near future.

Malaysia– Offers Excellent Culturally-adapt Creative Talent Pool for theWorld

Malaysia has rich creative talent pool in support by a myriad number of creative institutes, such as LimKokWing Institute of Creative Technology, Multimedia University, The One Academy, and more; and such workforce has been tapped by most high value project across the region. One of its very unique attractions is the multiracial community in Malaysia. This multiethnic environment, comprising of the Malays, Chinese, Indian and others grooms the workforce capable of handling multicultural team and project at global level and has made it uniquely positioned as the most versatile global animation production hub with its multilingual workforce. Apart from English and the common ethnic languages, a growing prominence in the increasing proficiency in the Japanese and Korean language has given Malaysia an added advantage over traditional Media hubs.
Meanwhile, Malaysian studios such as Les' Copaque Production, Animasia Studio, Backbone Entertainment and Young Jump Animation are also building their own internal animation training modules, programmes to help upgrade & improve efficiency / productivity and train more local talents to master their animation skills.

Malaysia– Offers Attractive Grants & Incentives for Content Developmentfor the World

Unlike most countries around the world, Malaysian production companies are fortunate to be able to take advantage of the many government-driven grants and incentives. eContent fund (under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation) is one of the funds that have financed co-production deals for Malaysian Companies, such as Shock3D!, Animasia Studio, Vision Animation, Backbone Entertainment, Les' Copaque Production, and more. Many of the grant recipients who completed its production successfully distributed its animation programme to renowned foreign broadcasters and commercialised its contents into mobisodes, games, comics, and merchandising. Malaysia also saw the successful release of her first 3D feature-length animated movie Geng: the Adventure Begins (produced by an MSC Malaysia company, Les Copaque Productions Sdn Bhd) which proves that local stories also can command box office success if the production and story are of high standards. The film's success has also resulted in a successful licensing and merchandising deal based on the film's characters and recently winning the Audience Choice Award at the Indonesian International Film Festival for Kids 2009. We also saw a number of world-class creative companies establishing their regional base in Malaysia, including Rhythm and Hues, Codemaster, Al Jazeera, Endemol, Qtelmedia, Gonzo Rosso, Bloomberg, Reuters, and more.

Besides the eContent Fund, Malaysia is aggressively showing its support to the Malaysian digital content industry by providing encouraged government support. The Malaysian government and agencies play its role to facilitate market access and industry development more efficiently and effectively. Various incentive campaigns are constantly formulated and improved to provide assistance in an orderly manner. There is an estimation of about 70 over funds available in Malaysia in terms of creative technology acquisition, financial support (funds & grants), incentives and more targeted for the development of companies in the area of entertainment and media. To view the current list of funds and grants, refer to: Funding & Incentives.

Malaysia– Delivers Successful World-Class IPs for the World

Malaysia saw the successful release of its first 3D feature-length animated movie Geng: the Adventure Begins (produced by an MSC Malaysia company, Les Copaque Productions Sdn Bhd) which proved that local stories also can command box office success if the production and story are of high standards. The 90 minutes feature, launched in Malaysia on February 12, 2009, racked in over RM 6 million from cinema ticket sales and more than 500,000 people watched the film within the first two weeks, coming close to all time champion Lagi Lagi Senario in 2001. The film's success has also resulted in a successful licensing and merchandising deal based on the film's characters and recently winning the Audience Choice Award at the Indonesian International Film Festival for Kids 2009.

This successful completion and comercialisation of Geng is a testimonial of Malaysia's highly skilled talents, world-class infrastructure and passion. 100% Made in Malaysia, Geng took only two years, RM4 million and 40 local animators (many of which were graduates of Cyberjaya's Multimedia University). Since then, Geng has also been shown well in other theatrical releases in other parts of South East Asia and most recently in India. Furthermore, in partnership with IndiaTales and KenFilms, the attractive Malaysian characters of Upin & Ipin also successfully travelled to the theatres of India. Malaysia till date has screened many Indian movies, but this is the first time a Malaysian movie have had a mega release in India.
On 23rd November 2009, Les' Copaque Production also created another success story when they premiered "Upin & Ipin" on Disney Channel (Asia), a spin-off TV series from "Geng". It also could now be seen on TV9, ranking the second-highest rated cartoon series on television with an estimated 1.5 million viewers, which puts ahead of "SpongeBob" (800,000 viewers) and behind only "Doraemon" (1.6 million).

Animasia Studio Sdn Bhd also had as much success in 2009 when another local-flavored cultural TV series "Bola Kampung" made it to its Season 3 on Disney Channel (Asia), since its debut in 2007. Mixing football and traditional village style, the story delves into the transformation of a group of characters from different background. Bola Kampung was the first Malaysian-made animation to be licensed and broadcasted by Disney Channel across 16 Asian countries, in addition to RTM.

In 2009, Animasia Studio also made history by having "Supa Strikas", a football fast-paced story based on the hit comic book series, becoming the first animated series to be broadcasted on ESPN-Star Sports Asia, in addition to Disney Channel (Asia) and RTM.

Another major property is MSC Malaysia Company - Inspidea Sdn Bhd's Boo & Me, which was commissioned by KidsCo, an international children's entertainment brand (owned by leading media companies NBC Universal, Cookie Jar Group and Corus Entertainment), to produce cartoon series about Mother Nature, conservation, recycling and other topics. The exciting co-production between KidsCo and Inspidea is a pay TV exclusive to the channel worldwide and is currently aired on KidsCo throughout Europe, Russia, Middle East, Africa and Asia. While it is clear that the investment from KidsCo reflects its confidence and commitment to the project, the deal is sweetened by the fact that Inspidea retains all intellectual property rights to the title. Even though KidsCo retains broadcast exclusivity, Inspidea still has the option of utilizing Boo and Me for merchandising or online content.

The latest success for Malaysia will be the success of distributing animation feature co-production to 50% of the world's population in Asia, Latin America and Europe. Already confirmed so far to: Select Media Holdings for India, China Lion (Beijing) Cultural Media and Beijing Bona Film & Television Culture co. for China, Ciptu Mutu Entertainment for Indonesia, K& Entertainment for South Korea, Wild Side for France, Splendid for Germany, Duka Film for Turkey, California Filmes for Latin America, Luxor for Russia and former CIS regions, Kino Swiat of Poland, MT Entertainment of Indonesia, etc. "SeeFood", supported partially by Malaysia's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), is an animated feature film co-produced by Silver Ant (Malaysia) and Al Jazeera Children's Channel (JCC). This high-quality 3D animation production is 100% Made-in-Malaysia. This will mark JCC's second major co-production with Malaysia, after its co-production with Malaysian Government-owned Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) on "Saladin: An Animated Series".