88 Pictures tackles the media production talent gap via innovative training

In a shifting global labor market, the media production talent gap is a pressing issue for most organizations—attracting and retaining skilled employees remains a challenge. According to Autodesk’s 2025 State of Design & Make report, maintaining talent is a perennial struggle for firms, identified by 26% of leaders as a top challenge at their organization. The search for skilled talent is especially difficult, with nearly two-thirds of leaders saying they struggle to find employees with the skills they need (PDF p. 47).

88 Pictures, a production company with offices in India and Canada, is proactively tackling the media production talent gap to support its strategy for growth. The company established its own training institute, called Gurukul, as a key part of its efforts to recruit and upskill employees. The approach is providing opportunities for talented prospects in rural areas of India to pursue careers in media—a path previously unavailable due to a lack of resources.

“We are a premium service animation company that works with the likes of DreamWorks, Netflix, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Disney. We predominantly started as an Indian company with a base in Toronto,” says Milind D. Shinde, founder and CEO of 88 Pictures. The company’s credits include animated series and films such as Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight, Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans, Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai, and season two of Transformers: EarthSpark. 88 Pictures also develops its own media projects for international markets.

“We’re migrating into more of an international company with a presence in different parts of the world, and also moving into higher value-chain products, such as feature films and visual effects,” says Shinde. Maintaining a base of highly skilled workers is integral to this transition.

Maintaining a right-size talent base is particularly critical in the volatile media and entertainment industry. “A couple of years ago there was a big surge in buying content and everybody was busy, but now that has sunk down,” says Shinde. “It poses a lot of business challenges for companies from a scalability perspective. Typically, you’re seeing a lot of unfortunate de-hiring happening across the world.”

At the same time, operation costs—including infrastructure, software, and talent— continue to rise. “The only way to overcome that is to try and elevate yourself with higher-level value-chain products, which gives you a better margin. But that requires higher skillsets,” Shinde says. Attracting and developing talent is critical to business growth.

Building a workforce with the right skills can be even more difficult for organizations spread across the globe. An additional challenge for 88 Pictures, according to Shinde, is that animation is a relatively new discipline in India, taking shape only in the last 20 years. “What you get typically is raw talent from the market. Then as an organization, you have to invest in training to make them ready for action.”

88 Pictures’ Gurukul training institute, named after a centuries-old form of schooling in India, was developed as a passion project for Shinde to develop raw talent. “I started this initiative because I came from a small town and I’m only the product of opportunities that were available,” he says. “We find students from different parts of the country where they don’t have a lot of infrastructure, but they have a lot of curiosity, a lot of innate skills.”

Candidates for the program go through a rigorous screening process that includes portfolio reviews and technical assessments. After that, “we get them into the studio and we train them for three months,” says Shinde. Training and mentorship is provided by the creative heads of the departments of 88 Pictures. If students want to become modelers, for example, they’ll learn technology tools such as Autodesk Maya, and get started by creating basic props before progressing to more complex props and sets of objects.

When the training is complete, students are offered a chance to work on projects as full-time employees. “We assign them to a buddy system and put in 12 to 18 months to help them keep growing,” Shinde says. “The concept of Gurukul is training and retraining. There’s a continuous effort, not only for entry-level talent but also at a higher level. For example, all our clients are from North America, so our leadership has to have presentation and English-speaking skills. This is upskilling to make them all-round talents, rather than somebody who just creates models.”

Shinde expects that demand for content will increase again in the coming years, but studios will pay less than during the pandemic content boom. For studios to remain competitive, they’ll need to invest more in technology so projects can be carried out faster, cheaper, and better. “That can only happen through digital transformation,” says Shinde. “Humans have a limit for efficiency, so there has to be digital efficiency.”

One aspect of this, he says, is developing internal systems and solutions that deliver faster and better results. The second is finding new tools to improve efficiency, like real-time technologies for faster rendering and computing, or Autodesk Flow Production Tracking for production management and collaboration. 88 Pictures was an early adopter of Flow (previously called ShotGrid), using it to identify human or process inefficiencies. “All this put together, I would call digital transformation,” Shinde says.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers another avenue toward digital transformation. “Some part of AI can be used in a typical workflow, to have quicker ways of doing iterations or computing tasks—it will definitely add value,” Shinde says. “That requires new ways of thinking.”

88 Pictures is not currently using AI on projects for its clients, because the contracts don’t allow it. “Everything has to be original art that you create, that the client owns,” he says. However, for “proprietary initiatives that we do in-house—creating our own films or our own games—we are relying on an AI tool that is available in the market.”

For example, the company used AI to create visuals with a unique look and feel for one of its games. “We went back to an old hand-drawn painting style from India, from centuries ago. Those artists don’t exist anymore,” he says. “Our art department tried to figure out that style, but it was a struggle. Then we found a way to bring it to life using AI to create the visual storytelling. We can do that because it’s our own product—we found a way to turn AI into art.”

As technology and AI accelerate, Shinde plans to evolve the Gurukul training program to help employees enhance their skills for the future. He sees “art thinking” as essential: “Art thinking is about understanding shapes and color theory, and developing the eye for motion. How would a piece of cloth made of cotton move, versus satin? And people going into surfacing or compositing or lighting don’t necessarily have an idea of color theory,” he says. “We want to develop the curriculum to teach art thinking around visualization of movements, weight, colors.”

As use of AI in the media and entertainment industry evolves, the importance of art thinking and human creativity will grow. “AI can bring your imagination to life, but you'll have to curate it,” Shinde says. “AI can give you five options and get you to the 70% level. But it’s that last 30% that’s going to make it the most interesting thing that anybody has seen. You take it and make it your own.”

Gurukul’s programs providing comprehensive training and upskilling for employees have been a success for 88 Pictures, delivering students who become production-ready for high-quality projects in a just a few months. But in addition to ensuring a solid pool of entry-level talent to draw from, companies need to find ways to hold onto that talent in a high-demand market. “People can work for anybody from anywhere,” Shinde says. “What’s in it for me if I’m the talent?”

“It goes back to the hiring stage itself, where you have to curate the talent that you require,” he says. “Once we get them into the system, we nurture them with an ecosystem that makes them feel invested.” He describes three key considerations that help 88 Pictures retain employees: “One is culture, company philosophy. The second is the projects that they work on, and the technology you provide: the right pipeline and right workflows make artists’ lives easier. Third is just good pay and benefits.”

The company’s ongoing workforce development efforts have resulted in a highly skilled loyal workforce that supports the company’s growth and competitiveness in the animation industry. “We have one of the lowest attrition rates in our industry, because we use a very methodological and thoughtful way of managing talent.”