The VFX and More (VAM) Summit organised by Animation Xpress India living up to its theme ‘Rising to soar’ gave a sneak-peak to the participants of how an artist’s vision is realized on celluloid when with technical and computing solutions aiding them in gratifyingly deliver their creativity. The third day of the virtual summit witnessed an interesting presentation on ‘Making of 83’, the movie starring Bollywood’s versatile actor Ranveer Singh as cricketing legend Kapil Dev. ReDefine 2D head Bharat De shared the visual effects breakdown of the sports drama 83.
After sharing the breakdown, he spoke about the various challenges his team faced while working on the period film that is wrapped with sheer nostalgia for many. The frenzy surrounding the story of the Indian squad that won the 1983 Cricket World Cup was brought to life by amazing techniques used by the visual effects artists.
The artists at ReDefine worked on a mix of 3D and 2D shots to recreate the period drama.
“We distributed the entire 3600 plus shots into categories. 300 artists were working on those shots,” De said at the second edition of VAM Summit.
Also, there were more than 120 compositors working on this project.
De gave a shot by shot glimpse of the making to make it clear for the VFX enthusiasts to understand the techniques of creating visuals for a period film. He revealed pre-visualization was done for a few shots for some major shots. It was done along with the storyboard.
The essence of audience regaling at galleries, taking us back to the moment when Indians created history on foreign grounds, has been beautifully captured in the film. The entire gallery, the audience and the crowd was computer generated.
There was the CG stadium where the team had to create old London. They downloaded plate references and worked on them to create the structures.
Also, making Ranveer Singh step into the shoes of Kapil Dev was a challenging task for ReDefine. The bowling action was fixed with creating CG balls after the on ground shooting.
“We created a lidar scan and wanted to do a complete CG face of Ranveer, to make the bowling action look as close as Kapil. We had created an animation which replicated Kapil bowling and had just put Ranveer’s face into it,” De shared.
They made use of 2D shots where they had to extend the crowd. Crowd reference was taken, placed on extension and a CG crowd was created replicating the 2D shots.
Two VFX supervisors were present on the sets during the shoot.
The extracted shots from the original World Cup were very limited. Some TV clippings that are shown in the film were taken from the original match. Otherwise, hardly any other footage was used in the film.
“There were 3600 plus shots, out of which 40 per cent was done on green screen and then 60 per cent was CG plus practical shoot,” De mentioned.
The movie 83 has been directed by Kabir Khan. It stars Deepika Padukone, Pankaj Tripathi, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Saqib Saleem, Jatin Sarna, Chirag Patil, Harrdy Sandhu, Sahil Khattar, Ammy Virk, Adinath Kothare, Dhairya Karwa, Jiiva, Dinker Sharma, Nishant Dahiya and R. Badree in significant role.