With a history of successfully Delivering Vfx for over 25 Bollywood Movies and being on a winning spree by achieving coveted recognitions & awards like Indian National Film Award, Filmfare Awards, IIFA, FICCI, Producers Guild Awards, Zee Cine Awards and many more,redchillies.vfx or rcvfx (as its fondly called) a division of Red Chillies Entertainment happily celebrated its glorious 7 years on April 2nd!!
Jumpstarted in 2006, by none other than Shah Rukh Khan along with Haresh Hingorani & Keitan Yadav and currently having a team force of 300 + artists, the operations at rcvfx are spearheaded by Keitan Yadav, who is the Chief Operations Officer / Vfx Producer and Haresh Hingorani, who is the Chief Creative Officer/ Vfx Supervisor.
redchillies.vfx has been known for a gallery of gigantic Bollywood movies to its credit including ‘Main Hoon Na’, ‘Paheli’, ‘Don’, ‘Chak De India’, ‘Om Shanti Om’, ‘Dostana’, ‘What’s Your Raashee’, ‘De Dana Dan’, ‘My Name is Khan’, ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan’, and has carried out Vfx work for path breaking Bollywood movie ‘Ra-One’, the most expensive & complex visual effects film ever made in India, which gave out an immensely creative sight of the Indian Vfx Industry and became a trend setter for Indian Vfx.
Presently, redchillies.vfx is working on Vfx for Rakesh Roshan’s directorial & Hrithik Roshan Starrer “Krrish 3” and has an interesting Vfx bank in the making for the near future with“Chennai Express” and “Happy New Year” movies on the charts.
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com about redchillies.vfx completing 7 years and expressing about the Benchmarks rcvfx set, Keitan Yadav states, “Feels extremely happy on completing 7 years of hardcore Vfx at redchillies.vfx. I feel, with every film we have done something new & unique. Have always worked to up the ante & taken up challenging projects and delivered them at the best possible quality.
According to Keitan, the benchmark that ‘Ra-One’ set was just not in quality or number of Vfx shot count of 3300+ but also in team strength of dedicated 400 artists from redchillies.vfx and additional hundreds of artists who have been a part of various outsourced studios in India and abroad working in a collaborative environment to achieve a single goal of quality effects. Some people still have doubts, but 97 percent of the Vfx work on Ra-One was completed in India and 90 percent of it was executed at redchillies.vfx facility and we are confident that all their doubts will be put to rest & their mindset will change once we deliver “Krrish 3” .
Haresh Hingorani, Chief Creative Officer and Vfx Supervisor of redchillies.vfx also feel’s immensely happy about the 7 year journey and points out that “Ra-One” was a grand movie and set a great platform, but also possessed a series of creative challenges.
Haresh highlights, “It’s been a long, successful journey till date! Later this year, we would be starting off with the Vfx for Happy New Year and also we have proposals for two extremely challenging projects.”
Going down on the memory lane of rcvfx, the company was established with a core team of eight members on board and till date this team is still the core Vfx driver at the company. Having a happening ratio of only 5% artists leaving the company in past 7 years, rcvfx follows a culture of bringing out creativity from the artists in two varied working shifts at the company.
Informing more about the team strength at various movie stages in these 7 years, Haresh says, “Up till ‘Don’ & ‘Om Shanti Om’, there were around 30 artists at redchillies.vfx Coming to My Name is Khan; we had strength of 80 artists. And feels really happy to say that the core team back then is still with us for Krrish 3!
Getting into an in-depth and detailed flashback of redchillies.vfx journey, we start with Main Hoon Na, which was accomplished in 2004 by the core team, and the shots were graded on an analyzer and it was the first time that the team seamlessly blended the visual effects shots with non-vfx shots in the film.
Keitan informs, “For bringing out seamless Vfx & other shots for Main Hoon Na (2004), we didn’t have the desired technology in India and hence he headed to London to scan the movie images on a North Light scanner in raw format & then matched the shots on an analyser & still achieved desired result without getting into DI.
A noted achievement for redchillies.vfx was creating hardcore CGI and using Milo Motion Control System for the movie Paheli (2005) which had 30 minutes of Vfx and a creative team of only 12 artists on board who completed the projected within three months.
Keitan expresses more on the climax sequence of Don (2006) in which Shahrukh Khan carries himself, “Here, we did not want to make use of a body double or carry out a head replacement. We are happy that we’ve managed to bring it right as both are infact SRK.”
Coming to the making of Chak De (2007), it was shot with 4 to 5 cameras running simultaneously & that too on different frame rates for bringing about the stadium shots, the team at redchillies.vfx shot all the ‘day’ crowd shots within in a day’s time and the night crowd shots in a span of three hours of night shoot. Also, the original hockey balls were replaced with CGI balls, CGI goal post & the score board were also created in Vfx adds Haresh.
Another milestone for rcvfx was Om Shanti Om (2007) in which they’ve made possible an unbelievable dance sequence starring Deepika Padukone dancing with legendary actors Sunil Dutt, Jeetendra and Rajesh Khanna. Keitan says, “With the technologies adopted for this song, the DOP could actually see Sunil Dutt, Jeetendra and Rajesh Khanna, while shooting on his camera monitor and could easily match camera moves and lighting. When we showed this song to a core team member of Avatar & explained him how we achieved it, he was so amazed and enthralled that he commented “Even though in a small way but you guys did it before us” and we feel, this statement was a great achievement for us”.
Coming to the Vfx of Dostana (2009), rcvfx created a major cost cutting ideation by shooting Priyanka Chopra’s House at Goregaon Film City and crafting a Miami City touch to it. In what’s Your Raashee (2009), they’ve brought across a dance sequence which shows 12 Priyanka Chopra’s dancing & interacting with Harman Baweja.
In De Dana Dan (2009), rcvfx have made possible a water flowing sequence, which is the climax of the movie. Coming to the movie Kites (2010), the studio has created an entirely CG sea in the Gulf of Mexico, making it look like the cliff. For My name is Khan (2010), they’ve created the flood sequence at Goregaon Film City and turned it into a completely USA look and feel. The studio has also worked on some Vfx shots for Kamal Hassan starrer, Vishwaroopam (2013).
”Internally, we’ve grown more like an IT company, become more corporate and organized! Myself and Haresh used to jointly supervise initially. Ra-One onwards, I’ve completely started overseeing the business, production & management at redchillies.vfx & Haresh has taken over the creative & supervision side.
Shares more, “We started bringing into picture, second layer of supervisors and a dedicated team of senior line producers, line producers, associate line producers and a big team co-coordinators. With time, the team structure was changed and currently there are various team leads for various Vfx requirements.”
Keitan shares, “Krrish 3 is a prestigious, flagship project for us. The Vfx sequences are the most complex & challenging we have undertaken till date. I’m sure with Krrish 3, we would be able to change how people see and perceive Vfx in India.”
Haresh adds, Krrish 3 has a bulk of creative challenging Vfx sequences and also includes hardcore CGI & compositing, which needs to match the Hollywood standards. Haresh believes that Hrithik Roshan has an admirable capability of understanding the kind of body language required for the shots and has a pre-notion about how shots will come out after instilling visual effects.
Haresh shares more, “In Krrish 3, there are very eye catchy vfx sequences. Hrithik Roshan is an actor of a great caliber and coming to the stunt sequences; he accomplishes all the rich shots himself and doesn’t make use of body doubles.
The Vfx work for Krrish 3, which is mostly slated for Diwali release and Chennai Express which would see an Eid release is simultaneously taking shape at rcvfx. Keeping in mind the intensity and need for maintaining work flow on Chennai Express; we’ve assembled an entirely new team force, set up an additional new floor, new equipment and infrastructure to complete Chennai Express on time without disturbing work on Krrish. Work is challenging but it is interesting, shares Keitan.
Keitan shares further,“ On Krrish 3, Rakesh Roshan has smartly shot the Vfx portion early and handed over the edits to rcvfx. Since Rakeshji has made various superhero films prior to this, he’s completely aware about how the whole Vfx chain works and hence they provided us shots earlier so that we jumpstart Vfx on it.”
In the view of Haresh, Krrish 3 would set a new benchmark and after seeing this movie, many producers would be keen on taking up super hero or sci-fi concepts and it would benefit the growth of Vfx in India. With the completion of 7 years, in future redchillies.vfx also visions to venture into producing or co-production of vfx intensive movies which would raise the bar for the company & put them in a different league.
Haresh reveals a catchy stand point, “SRK has had a long vision of creating a series of Ra-One movies and hopefully post completion of Happy New year, and we would kick start into production of Vfx Movies.”
An incredible piece of news shared by Dimple Arora, Head HR is that redchillies.vfx is now “Motion Picture Association of America” (MPAA) Compliant Studio. “redchillies.vfx” was one of the first company to go through an ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certification in the year 2008. A major transition now for rcvfx is switching up one level with MPAA Compliance. Getting into a broader perspective on MPAA complaince , they made this decision to extend their potential of catering to the Hollywood & International Vfx projects.
Speaking more on this, Keitan shares, “On the international front rcvfx as company has executed work only on Halo 3 promo till date. With MPAA Certification, it’s now time for us to move on to the next stage and capture International Projects. We want to enter international markets, whether with collaboration, studio to studio outsourcing or working as a single studio on a Hollywood project. Additionally we also aim to create our own IP, and fetch projects from local as well as International markets.
Commenting on MPAA Certification for redchillies.vfx, Krishna Prasad, Information Technology Analyst for AVGC Industry, shares, “MPAA covers three major criteria’s including digital security, employment security, employment related parameters which get appraised and these areas should be defined, structured and controlled. The policies or discipline which a studio or a software company follows show the way they are structured, disciplined in delivering the quality of work, the content delivered to the client’s and also security policies. We defined the structure for redchillies.vfx and I collected information about the kind of work happening at rcvfx and plugged the loopholes as far as the digital security is concerned.
There is a set of rules designed by MPAA and in this certification we secure the content of the company with the Disaster Recovery aspect. There comes an offsite recovery solution as a part of MPAA in which crucial content is kept off the main building. “