Keitan Yadav wants Indian visual effects in the film before the first camera rolls, not after the last take.
When Redchillies.vfx opened its doors in 2006 the brief was simple: show the world that top-flight visual effects could be made in India. Nearly twenty years on, the conversation has shifted. For chief operating officer Keitan Yadav the next step is no longer about proving the studio can deliver. It is about sitting in the room while the film is still being imagined.
“For us, VFX starts with the script, not the software,” Yadav said. The first question is never what the software can do. It is what the filmmaker wants the audience to feel. Only then does the team decide what to capture in camera, what to enhance and what to build from scratch. Previsualisation, technical planning, research and on-set supervision come next. Asset creation, animation, effects, lighting, compositing and finishing follow later.
On a film the size of King (the upcoming action thriller starring Shah Rukh Khan) that early work matters more than ever. “The battle of good VFX is actually fought long before a shot reaches an artist.” The spectacular moment that lasts a few seconds on screen may have been shaped months earlier in planning meetings and previs sessions.
There is an old line in the business: if you cannot notice the VFX, the job is done. Yadav still holds to it. Photorealism is unforgiving. Audiences may not know the technology, but they know when something feels wrong. A lighting mismatch, a scale error, a texture that does not sit right can break the spell. When those decisions have to hold across hundreds or thousands of shots the pressure multiplies.
Scale cannot come at the cost of belief. Whether the film is Jawan or King, the audience should stay inside the world, not step outside to ask how the effect was made. Sometimes the most impressive work is the work nobody notices.
Yadav likens a heavy VFX production to a Jenga tower. The higher it climbs, the riskier any change at the base becomes. Bring visual effects into the conversation early and filmmakers can decide what to shoot practically, what to extend and where the budget will actually show on screen. Supervisors need to stand next to directors and cinematographers on set. Not every problem needs an expensive computer-generated fix. Better planning, sharper previs or a smart mix of live action and effects can often deliver a stronger result. On King the rule is clear: put the complexity where the audience will feel it, not everywhere simply because it is possible.
Technology is moving fast through the pipeline. Yadav values tools that bring an idea closer to the screen, not tools that try to replace the person making the creative call. “AI comes in useful when it accelerates ideation, iteration, repetition and vision, not when it replaces creative judgement.” The studio has already tested the ground. Its work on Dashavatar earned recognition for best use of AI. Real-time tools and virtual production are also shifting decisions earlier. Technology, Yadav insists, remains an extension of the artist, never the artist itself.
Ask how the studio keeps consistency across thousands of frames and the answer is direct. “A lot of systems. A lot of human eyes.” There are shared looks, asset libraries, colour pipelines, camera and lens data, review structures and supervisors. Systems alone are not enough. Taste still matters. A trained eye spots the tiny lighting shift or the object that does not belong, the detail software can miss. Technology helps hundreds of artists produce consistent frames. Creative supervision makes sure those frames still tell the same story.
The studio’s past work shows how different the demands can be. Jawan needed environments, simulations and action sequences that stayed largely invisible. The village, the hospital and the highway each brought their own problems. Zero required visual effects in almost every frame so a regular-sized Shah Rukh Khan could become a dwarf-sized character. Fan asked for a convincing digital double of the actor. Ra.One remains one of the most demanding and rewarding projects the team has tackled.
Across all of them, the test stays the same. What matters is not whether the audience understands how much was created or manipulated. What matters is that they accept the space and stay inside the scene.
The bigger change underway is structural. “The shift happens when VFX is invited into the room before the shoot rather than after it.” India already has scale and technical talent. The next move is greater involvement in supervision, look development, research, previs and the design of sequences themselves. Indian studios can move from executing someone else’s plan to helping shape the visual language of the film. Growing interest in mythology, action, horror and other invented worlds only widens the opening.
And then there is King. Yadav offers no spoilers, only a quiet tease: something amazing is in the making. He will say the film ranks among the studio’s most ambitious projects in scale and complexity. For the rest, audiences will have to wait. The restraint feels right. Visual effects are as much about knowing what to leave unseen as what to reveal.
When VFX teams join a project before the cameras turn, almost everything changes. Early involvement brings predictability. More importantly, it opens creative possibilities. Storyboards, previsualisation and concept art become a shared map for the whole production. Teams can test ideas before an expensive shoot day, decide what can be achieved practically and design clean transitions between live action and computer-generated work. The relationship itself changes. Instead of receiving a problem at the end of production, the VFX team becomes one of the tools a filmmaker uses while designing the film. That is the difference between a service provider and a filmmaking partner.
Sometimes the job is to make the audience ask how they did that. Other times the job is to make sure the question never arises. The technology will grow more powerful. Pipelines will become more automated. AI will speed the earliest stages of an idea. The heart of the craft stays human: knowing what the story needs, knowing what the audience should feel, and knowing when the technology should disappear completely.
For Redchillies.vfx the next twenty years may not be about building bigger worlds. They may be about helping filmmakers imagine worlds that did not exist before.
