Visual effects, made in India

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: For the past four-and-a-half months, production and visual effects company Prime Focus has been working on the visual effects of a British independent film Tales of the River Bank, directed by Peter Watson and slated for a 2008 release.

As Amit Gupta, director, corporate development, Prime Focus, transports the 1,400 VFX (visual effects) shots to London, there is a sense that Indian studios are coming of age and executing high-end shots for big international releases. Tata Elxsi’s visual computing lab (VCL) is working on an episodic 3D series for a North American client and doing visual effects for a project for one of the largest studios of Hollywood. While non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) prevent many of these companies from talking at length on these international assignments, Bhaskar Dutt, head, marketing, VCL, Tata Elxsi admits that, “Indian studios are gradually, but surely, doing more high-end work than they were doing some years ago. It’s a process and work is picking up.”

VCL is working with almost all the big Hollywood studios and has already executed projects for Sony Pictures Images, MGM, Columbia. For Prime Focus, the ‘breakthrough’ project was 20th Century Fox’s 28 Weeks Later, the apocalyptic sci-fi thriller that was released this May, for which the DI (digital intermediate) and visual effects were handled by their London and Indian studios.

This is the company’s first full-length Hollywood project after it acquired a 20-year-old London studio last year. A team of about 25 artists in India and about 15 in London collaboratively worked on over 100 visual effects shots in the project, which included a complicated sequence of napalm bombing of London at night. Also, a lot of photo real props like military vehicles, planes and choppers were added to many of the scenes digitally.

The fact that India is slowly gaining ground in VFX outsourcing is also evident from other happenings—like, for instance, Los Angeles-based and Oscar-winning animation and visual effects studio Rhythm & Hues has been growing its India operations, with one in Mumbai and the other coming up in Hyderabad. Some of the milestone projects the Indian studio has worked on over the past two years have been Night at the Museum, Superman Returns, and The Chronicles of Narnia.