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Making the unreal look real

Technology has changed the way movies look on screen, making the impossible believable and giving users an extraordinary experience. By Kushal Shah

Be it Superman flying across the globe, Spiderman spreading his webbing to travel in New York City or our very own Krrish jumping over Singapore’s skyscrapers and climbing mountains in a jiffy; all these need high end support from artists and technicians behind the scenes. These superheroes wouldn’t have made it to the big screen without post-production houses, animations studios and software makers.

For a long time Indian movies have been pure shoots with little of technology being involved in terms of editing and removing goof ups. In last three to four years we have seen a dramatic upsurge in the usage of technologies in Indian cinema.

“If I look at the last two to three years, post production houses were looked upon as the rescue team to cover up goof ups and remove wires and stuff from the screen. Now thanks to the latest technologies, film makers are coming up with just the concept and want us to work hand in hand with them right from the start,” says Vinod P Vijay, Creative Director, Prime Focus Ltd

If we look at the rapid and extensive role of post-production houses, we are not far away from making a Lord of the Rings in India.

Tech on tap

The use of technology is growing manifold. Some specific technology intensive areas of film making are visual effects, which are known as VFX, editing, and digital intermediate (DI) an absolutely new concept for Indian movies.

The term VFX generally deals with computer-generated imagery (CGI), composting, title design and animatronics. Every movie made these days is bundled with loads of special effects and artistic work. Compositing refers to creating new images or moving images by combining images from different sources—such as real-world digital video, film, synthetic 3D imagery, 2D animations, painted backdrops, digital still photographs, and text.

Editing a movie is an integral function of the movie making process. Gone are those days of editing movies by cutting physical reels. Today’s editors use high end software for this purpose.

There are many parts of a movie that need to be touched up if not created wholesale using technology. This is where the concept of DI comes in. It is all about changing colours or correcting them in the entire movie. DI has become quite important for Bollywood from its inception three years back. If we see the scale of adoption of this technology it has gone up from one movie three years back to 100 last year. DI can change the entire look of the movie and the way in which it is presented to the audience. “Presenting the movie is as important as the content of the movie and since we are getting 50 percent of our revenues from western markets it is essential to present the movie well owing to the competition from the likes of Babel, Superman and such movies,” says Pankaj Kedia, Regional Manager, South East Asia, China & India, Autodesk Media and Entertainment. A good example of this in Indian filmdom is Black. The movie known for its look owes part of its success to this technology.

It’s not only the fact that producers and directors want their films to be processed in digital labs after the shooting is done. Film makers are even going to production houses with the rough sketch of the storyline and using the latest technologies extensively to visualise their movies before the first shot is called. Post-production houses have even started moving to the role of pre-production by providing facilities such as pre-visualisation, character designs, story boarding and layouts. This helps director do his homework before going for the actual shoot.

Before and after: an animated van is rendered by PrimeFocus for a commercial. The image on the left is a sketch. The one on the right is the rendering of the same.

Free your mind

The intense use of technology improves a movie in more than one way. Firstly it helps a director to be more narrative and writers do not have to restrict their imagination.

There are some sequences in a movie which look real but are not. They use technology in the best way to save cost and would be prohibitively expensive if shot with a camera on a physical set. “If a director wants full fledged scenery behind the Gateway of India it is not practical to shoot this. However, it can be made possible with the help of technology and thus it saves a lot of cost in building the structure in reality,” says Kedia. This even makes one’s imagination soar beyond the actual capacity of what can be shot on location. With the help of special effects you can show Amitabh Bacchan jumping or doing a rough sequence which would otherwise be impractical on account of his age.

Tools in hand

Software companies are continuously trying to come up with products to make the lives of production houses easier. Some of the companies venturing in the entertainment software are Autodesk, Adobe and Apple. All of them have specialised products in each category of film processing. One of the biggest vendors for this category Autodesk comes with an array of post production software to help designers and film editors add their special touch to a movie. In terms of VFX, Autodesk’s Inferno and Flame are online visual effects systems; Flint, Toxik and Combustion are desktop based VFX software.

In terms of services provided for editing and finishing, Smoke is one of the market leaders across the world. It is an online non-linear creative editing and finishing solution.

Taking care of DI is the software called Luster which according to Autodesk is the standard software used for digital colour correction across the globe and one of the most expensive bundles of code with its cost going as high as half a million dollars. In terms of 3D animation, the applications available are 3Ds Max and Maya which are used in most studios in the country. Both are from Autodesk and their price ranges from about $1,000 to $500,000.

Some of the other options available are in the form of Adobe After Effects, Apple Shake, Apple Final Cut Studio etc. All these software requires expertise to use them and intense training to boot.

FX infrastructure

It is not only the cost of the software which a studio has to bear, but that of infrastructure. One of the most infrastructure dependent applications is rendering. Rendering and related activities put a great deal of pressure on a pre- or post-production house’s IT department. IT departments at various studios have to create rendering farms to support this activity. One of the VFX studios of Prime Focus has to bear the load of as many as 50 1U blades each with 4 quad core processors and to tackle so many projects’ raw data at once, more than 50 TB of hard disk space is allotted with room on more disks empty in the rack. To save on expenditure of these expensive resources, studios work in shifts which even help to insure that resources are used efficiently and not underutilised.

Apart from processing power and disk space, studios go in for top-end graphics cards depending on the applications being used. In a typical animation studio like Crest, different departments of animation have different needs. A process of rigging needs a graphic card in the range of the Nvidia 1500 and more intense applications of special effects have a higher requirement of the Nvidia 3500.

“Irrespective of all these expenses, we should look at IT as an enabler and not just as the highest spending department. These expenses are bringing more business to animation studios and adding value to the organisation,” says P Krishna Prasad, IT-Head, Crest Animation Studios Limited.

Room for improvement

If we talk on what else we can improve, there is a lot of room for improvement from both vendors and users from a studio’s perspective. According to Kedia, improvement can be looked at from three areas. One is that the efficiency of the software needs to improve so that complex applications can be handled without increasing the budget. Two, workflow of the entire process needs to be fine-tuned so that more users can work on same application in parallel and lastly there is a need to improve on the features of the tools used.

A user will always feel that something is lacking in the tool that they use and they need more from a particular application. “For a particular project the technology used seems limited irrespective of high usage of all the tools available. We have to be restrictive in what we want to achieve because of that,” says Vijay. In order to tackle with such problem Prime Focus has set up an R&D and programming team who can build needed plug-ins as per the requirement of a project. This team is gradually growing into a department.

One of the urgent needs in terms of technology is that of proper asset management software with the help of which a team can conveniently, effectively and seamlessly store data providing a single GUI to retrieve all types of data irrespective of its format. Another need according to Vijay is that of software to work cross country since they also have a studio in London. This can make simultaneous work on a project easier.

“We lack 3D scanning devices and there is a need of separate departments such as sculpting and Marquette to help improving the performance and quality of work,” says Vijay.

The growth of this industry is immense if we see the number of movies coming out of the FX studios every year. With almost every movie going through post productions touch up work and slick movies becoming the norm, we are almost there to match Hollywood’s standards as far as technology is concerned.

We have no lack of talent and with the opportunity of outsourcing such work in hand we are poised to take on the world in post production work.