Prime Focus has recently delivered a range of post services for Bollywood’s latest satirical-comedy movie ‘Oh My God’. Directed by Umesh Shukla, the movie features Mithun Chakraborty and Paresh Rawal in lead roles, with Akshay Kumar in a cameo role. Govardhan Vigraham, VFX supervisor, Prime Focus along with 45 talented artists delivered 234 VFX shots for the film in little over a month.
In addition to VFX and DI, the film was sound mixed by renowned mixing engineer; Ajay Kumar P.B. Prime Focus has also provided cameras through its EQR service.
OMG is based on the life of Kanjibhai (Paresh Rawal), an antique shop owner. The film revolves around his attempt at taking down God, which he is unable to do but clearly doesn’t realize. Kanji soon begins to fight all the priests of the city, which causes mayhem until Lord Krishna (Akshay Kumar) pays Kanji an unexpected visit.
Speaking about the movie, Prime Focus’ Co- Founder and Chief Creative Director, Merzin Tavaria said, “It was a great experience working with director Umesh Shukla. He has an astounding artistic vision and we are glad to have delivered to his expectations. We have worked on some really complex VFX shots, especially the ‘Sandstorm’ and ‘Bike’ sequences. We worked on each of these shots with a lot of attention to detail to make it look as seamless as possible. Our VFX team has worked tirelessly to create spectacular visuals that helped enhance the storyline of the movie.”
“One of the most challenging sequences from the movie would be the ‘sandstorm’” says Govardhan Vigraham. “We had to create a realistic sandstorm, with a lot of dust and litter from the surroundings. It had to rapidly grow denser and cover up the whole space in the shot, but look natural at the same time. To get a better sense of the behavior of elements in a sandstorm, we took shots with minimal dust for reference. Thereafter we created CG generated elements such as bits of paper, plastic etc. using Maya’s Dynamics function.”
“For the climax sequence which involved a bike and the principal actors, we did not have Akshay available to shoot with the crowd and the other actors. This got us into a green screen situation, where we designed the shots with the notion of shooting the principal actors on a bike. We captured the shots from various angles and also from a techno-jib crane. The whole sequence had difficult rotoscopy work involved along with,
match-moving and compositing tasks.”
“Additionally, Prime Focus digitally enhanced the scene where hundreds of diyas are floating in the temple lake. A separate plate consisting of different form of diyas were shot, from which the compositors replicated them into hundreds of diyas, match moved the camera, added reflections, and smoke.”
Talking about the DI work done for the movie, Rohan Desai, DI Head and Chief Colorist, Prime Focus said, “Since OMG is a light hearted comedy movie, the treatment is glossy and colorful. The colors were enhanced to give it a bright-happy look. Most of the movie was shot in Mumbai. While the day sequences were treated with a normal glossy look, the night sequences were made to appear warm.”
The overall palette of the film was set by ace colorist SManoj C.P.K Verma. “The popular song of the movie – ‘Go Govinda’ was mainly shot on the streets of Mumbai and was graded to give it an oversaturated look. The majority of the movie was shot using Arri 435, but the climax was shot with a digital camera- Alexa. Hence while grading this shot; we had to maintain consistency.” said SManoj C.P.K Verma.