Visual effects, made in India

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: Los Angeles facility and a little over 200 in our Mumbai facility. So the work gets split up accordingly.”

And while it’s difficult to pinpoint the percentage of work that gets done in India, Seshaprasad points out that the “Mumbai facility is involved in all the stages like modelling, rigging, animation, lighting, camera tracking, technical animation and compositing. Today, the artists in India work on all of the same Hollywood feature films as our colleagues in Los Angeles, and we work together in a highly collaborative manner to deliver the highest quality imagery.”

At the moment, Rhythm & Hues Studios India is working on Newline Cinema’s The Golden Compass and Fox’s Alvin and the Chipmunks, Mummy 3 and The Incredible Hulk. Companies are increasingly opting for an east-west collaboration. Says Gupta: “We have the cost advantage, and they have many interesting ideas. Together, we can deliver the best images in the business.” But if the London VFX market is slated to be about $1 billion, the US market is five times that size. “Hollywood is Hollywood,” admits Gupta, and says the company is looking at entering the Hollywood market, either by acquiring a company or by setting up its own studio. Tata’s VCL too is thinking of expanding, both in India, with additional centres outside Mumbai, and overseas as well, points out Dutt.

The trend in Hollywood now, claim experts, is that a lot of the big-budget movies—think Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, Spiderman series—being made are using a lot of special effects. For instance, Spiderman 2 used 700-800 VFX shots. And yet, while volumes have increased, release schedules are not changed. Says Gupta, “Studios are breaking projects into multiple facilities to handle the sheer volume of work and release the film on schedule.” All this only means more business for Indian studios.

Mohan Krishnan, head, corporate communications, of the Chennai-based Prasad Group, stresses that setting up a studio in Hollywood in 2005 has gradually increased the workload in India. “We are catering both to the US and European market and though the kind of work we get is still not very high-end, it has changed from the low-end work we would get earlier.”