Indian folklore was creeping out of the shadows and into a haunted forest. The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest was taking shape as a fantasy thriller that mixed action, mythology and eye-popping spectacle. Its companion graphic novel, The Legend of Vvan, headed the other way, deep into the past.
Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia led the film, both cast to fit the grain of their characters. The source from Balaji and The Viral Fever (TVF) team told AnimationXpress that Malhotra’s history with action and Bhatia’s feel for fantasy and action made them the obvious picks for the leads. Their turns, backed by an ensemble cast, were meant to power the film’s entertainment quotient.
But the real sweat happened behind the screen. Conjuring a supernatural folk world took more than a cracking story and a spooky forest. It needed artists, technicians and whole teams marching in step, especially when visual effects were carrying a hefty slice of the show.
The Balaji and TVF team said one of the toughest jobs was throwing serious tech at the renders while holding international standards across the VFX. The goal was to make the effects glide along with the story instead of sitting on top like a bolt-on. The spectacle had to serve the tale, not hog the limelight.
A doorway into the myth
Then there was the world beyond the film.
Because The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest was dreamed up as a film first, The Legend of Vvan graphic novel was built as a second way in. Rather than just replaying the movie in comic panels, the team chose to stretch the universe with a companion story, fresh characters, more lore and extra supernatural flourishes. The upshot was a tale that plugged into the bigger film world while handing fantasy fans another piece of the jigsaw. The team called the comic a way to pile more layers to the story, leaving space for ideas that could roam beyond the film’s spine.
A spin-off from the past
The expansion came with a neat twist. The graphic novel ducked the usual movie-to-comic routine.
“We decided to create a spin-off story from the past,” said The Legend of Vvan writer Alok Sharma, who set the story in the 11th century and dug into the same myth from an earlier age. Instead of spilling the film’s plot, the comic used a short scene from the movie as a bookend, so it stood on its own two feet while still holding hands with the film.
Building that old world took homework. Team TVF and Balaji laid on a set visit and shared footage, but the design team, led by Saumin Suresh Patel, still had to rebuild what the Vvaan universe might have looked like in 11th-century India. Poring over the architecture and period detail set the visual language.
The digging went well past buildings and costumes. Sharma said the team treated every sequence as if art-directing a film, fussing even over the sociological grain of everyday life. Historical touchstones, from the sacking of Nalanda to the campaigns of Turkish invader Khalji, were stitched into the backdrop. All the while the comic kept ordinary folk at its heart, tracing the lot of common people while guarding the myth of Vvaan.
So The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest and The Legend of Vvan got two separate but linked lives. One was built for the big screen, the other a portal into the past. The film brought the spectacle, the comic brought the backstory. Put them together and the Vvaan universe looked like it had plenty more forest left to explore.
