RIYADH — The Misk Academy under the Prince Muhammad Bin Salman Foundation (Misk) launched Misk Academy Forum titled "1Hour Panel Talk" on Monday. The first panel discussion, titled "The Future of Animation in Saudi Arabia" was held at Prince Sultan University. The hosts at the event included Manga Productions CEO Dr. Essam Bukhari; filmmaker and director Aiman Jamal, whose movie "Bilal" was listed among the best ten animation films released in 2018; creative designer and director and producer of animation films Malik Najjar, who is the maker of the serial Masameer, and Omar Bin Dahlous, famous animator and art director. More than 100 young men and women in the field of animation and motion graphics attended the forum, which dealt with evaluation of local experiences compared to global motion pictures and reviewed the challenges facing animation makers in the Kingdom. It also sought creative solutions for the challenges, the future of animation film market and the best schools available in this field. The forum is a platform for interactive periodic discussions on a monthly basis with a group of experts and specialists on various topics including the fields of technology, leadership and digital media. This also aims at sharing their opinion and experiences about the future of technology, its fields and its impact on society and the economy. The platform comes with the aim of transferring experiences and raising awareness in the field of digital media, and providing young people who are interested in the media world with the information they needed to develop the future of technology in the Kingdom. Since its inception, Misk Academy has worked on launching a number of educational and developmental programs in technical skills, financial technology programs and creative digital media. All these are aimed at training and equipping Saudi youth and graduating a section of most talented ones to groom them as the next generation of leaders, entrepreneurs, developers, animators, filmmakers, designers and engineers, thinkers and innovators through cutting-edge career-focused educational experiences led by the highest quality faculty. Moreover, the academy targets introducing various experiences in the Kingdom in order to push the educational process to realize the knowledge economy and digital transformation. So for, more than 9,000 young Saudi men and women have been benefited from the academy's programs organized in over 30 cities and regions across the Kingdom and 80 percent of these beneficiaries have managed obtain placements.
