The Making of Bal Ganesh 
By Screen Weekly, October 26, 2007 - 09:33 IST
The recently released Bal Ganesh was a full length 3D CGI animated feature film based on Lord Ganesha's birth and childhood years. Director Pankaj Sharma explains the process
Step one:Choosing concept,
scripting, designing Primarily, choosing the concept was the first hurdle because we were in two minds to choose one among the three viz. - Hanuman, Krishna and Bal Ganesh - for all the three have many a story to tell. Once we arrived at a consensus to make a film on Bal Ganesh we made a 3-4 page concept after which we called upon our writers to write the story keeping in place all the authenticities. Now came the question as to who would be the 'sutradhar', like we have in all mythologicals. After a lot of mind-wrecking conversations, we thought upon to have a mouse with different looks as the sutradhar. Meanwhile after the story-writing got over, the scripting work started. Finally, came the important task of designing characters. Once the characters were finalised, working on the storyboard started. Along with the storyboard, screenplay writing also started. The war sequence that totally lasts for around eight to nine minutes was also chalked out.
Step two: Modelling, texturing
Simultaneously, the modelling department started creating models. After everything was in place, we started the work of rigging. Along with this, the skinning process started too, then texturing (every character doesn't have the same coloured skin, it differs from person-to-person). For this process our technicians worked on Autodesk's 3D Max character Studio.
Step three: Clothing, putting expressions and morphing
Then came the daunting task of clothing the characters. For a change we had to bring in real clothes to be draped on the characters, then we resorted to hairdo for which we had to resort to rendering for which there was ample of time. The next step was putting expressions on the face of the characters. Lip sync depends on the vowels and there were more than 20 characters (main). There were plenty of secondary targets on which not much was decided to be shown. This step is known as morphing.
Step four: Putting movement in characters
In such cases working of anatomy has to be studied perfectly, like when a character facing front turns right or left, his entire body language changes and the artists doing such a job has to cautiously study the movement and work accordingly. Finally comes the time when you have to put life into the characters. This step known as animation has two movements namely primary animation which focuses on the movements concerning the body and secondary animation that concerns the movement on the attire a character has worn etc. Then the background of every scene has to be taken care of. For better 3D effects we made dresses and wigs of the character. We might have done it through comparatively cheaper 2D sketches, but we knew it would have not given the real 3D look what we see in Hollywood's animation film. Though the end-product looks nice there is enormous toil that goes into the act of animation.
Step five: Lighting, rendering
As the shots are finalised comes the effect of lighting. Professional light technicians come on to the scene. Different kinds of lighting are necessary that would make a particular scene look authentic. The next process is re-composing and character rendering where background would be separate. After this process that the actual characters and scenes come to light. Then the film goes into the rendering process. For a rendering of this kind on video it takes around five months while on a film the process takes just an hour.
Step six: Dubbing
After re-composing, colouring we go into the process of dubbing. Actually dubbing was done before but for certain characters re-dubbing had to be resorted to. Eventually, the film got ready for release. We started working on the film in February 2006 and it took us eighteen months to complete the film from the pre-production to the post-production stage.
Screen India
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'Bal Ganesh' premieres at Cinemax Versova
