Interview with Prime Focus Chennai‘s Senthil Kumar & Bejoy Arputharaj on ‘Ayirathil Oruvan’ 08 February 2010 07:10 PM
‘Ayirathil Oruvan’ is a film that travels through time and a major part of the story is set in the midst of a 17th century Chola civilization. It took about two years for director Selvaraghavan to complete the movie and the Prime Focus, Chennai team who worked on the VFX for the movie to do about 1800 massive shots for the film that released recently. Speaking to Animationxpress.com’s Shiva Prasad,Prime Focus Chennai Station Head and VFX Supervisor for the project Senthil Kumar and VFX Project Lead & Technical Supervisor Bejoy Arputharaj share their experience on a fantastic ride to the Chola dynasty.
Bejoy Arputharaj
Senthil Kumar
With the movie set in the 17th century how did you go about planning the shots and delivering them? Bejoy: We started working with 3d models and props at the time of production itself. As we had a clear story board and script in our hands we knew what’s going to be in the final output. And once the shoot got over we were ready with almost 50% of 3D stuff that was going to be in the film. In the meantime our Visual Effects Supervisor & Station Head, Senthil Kumar was sending us data and photographs from the spot so that we can work on with our props and models.
Senthil: Also a lot of R&D stuff was happening at the studio as we knew we will not find time to do that at a later stage. Once the shoot got over we got the rough cut of the edit and we started working on the rest of the stuff.
Tell us about the VFX work involved and how important was the use of VFX for the movie? Bejoy: As it is a fantasy & adventure story, there were a number of organic and inorganic CG things involved in the movie. There were thousands of CG snakes, sea creatures, set extensions, touch ups, quick sand, mystic rocks, environment matte paintings, lava and a war sequence. The story depends fully on VFX as it narrates a journey of three people in search of a lost kingdom. The three of them should go through a number of traps and hurdles to discover the lost kingdom.
Before
After
And most importantly this one sequence, where the hero is forced to fight in an arena similar to the coliseum, against a man with a huge iron ball with a chain attached to it which was recreated in CG and the whole set was completely enhanced in CG.
With the director known for his off beat and trend setting films what kind of inputs did you receive from the director? Senthil: The director was very clear that VFX is going to play a major role in the movie and so he gave full freedom for us in the shoot and also in post. He listened to all our requirements and ideas and was very co-operative. He finalized everything in the pre-visualization stage and walked out to shoot with the story board. So he was very clear with the visuals.
Tell us about the most challenging shot in the movie. Bejoy: We had gone through a lot of challenges in each and every sequence. We faced a big challenge in creating the CG snakes; the sequence was shot in the night & lit with lots of torches and a halogen lamp. Our Lead lighting artist Bimal Bose managed to match the entire sequence with the original lights and the animation turned out very realistic under the Supervision of Raja.
Before
After
The camera shifts the focus from foreground to background, there are snakes all over the ground and matching the focus was quite difficult as all the snakes have to go through the shift focus and also they should look as if they were moving through the grass on the ground. The snakes will look real only if the focus and the ground interaction was right. But we came out with the solution in compositing and the final result was great.
With 90% of the movie involving VFX what was the size of the team working on the project? Senthil: 90% of the VFX work was carried out in Chennai Prime Focus, with a team of 30 highly skilled people in every aspect of VFX. We functioned with a 10 member compositing team, a 10 member 3d Team & a 10 member Roto-retouch team apart from some freelancers who joined us during the finishing time of the project.
Bejoy: We also took help from our brothers in our Mumbai & Hyderabad branches, some animation in the Coliseum sequence & dynamic simulations in the desert sequence were done at our Mumbai branch. Pre comp for Coliseum and some rotoscope & retouch were done in our Hyderabad branch. They gave us confidence by helping to finish the project on time.
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What kind of visible and invisible CG work have you used? Bejoy: 80% of all our work is invisible, except some fantasy FX shots that the director wanted particularly. We managed to cheat the audience with so many invisible CG shots except a few. Most of them never noticed anything, which I consider to be a big success for our team.
How was your experience working on a one of a kind movie from the Tamil industry which has over 1000 VFX shots? Senthil: It was really interesting, we learnt a lot, and still we have a lot to learn. Now we can confidently handle any scale of VFX in movies and this is really a good start for the Tamil VFX Industry. Prime Focus already rocks from Hollywood to Bollywood and now it has spread its wide wings in Kollywood too.
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an expertise of 2-5 years in the relevant domain handling any of the following
functions, apply in confidence.
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India`s No.1 Multimedia & Animation Academy
with one of the best state of the Art infrastructure requires trainers in the
field of:
