FutureWorks delivers VFX shots for Tum Mile

Mukesh Bhatt's Tum Mile takes a calamity that hit Mumbai in 2005 monsoons and tries to recreate the horror that the deluge brought with it. The protagonists of the film, played by Emraan Hashmi and Soha Ali Khan, are stuck in the deluge, as is the whole of the city.

Creating seamless, realistic digital effects for director Kunal Deshmukh was a tall order, but doing cinematically wide angle shots with such camera moves was an extra added attraction for the post-production studios who worked on Mukesh Bhatt's.' Tum Mile. "Kunal has a very astute eye," said FutureWorks' Abhishek De.

"It was important for the visual effects to look as though they were shot on real location on that rampageous day 26th July'05 in the middle of actual weather conditions. He didn't want the film to take on a gimmicky visual-effects look."

Visual-effects post-production house FutureWorks worked on the two shots set amidst the wide significant skylines of Mumbai, and worked hard on digital makeup for the city skyline and other atmospheric effects.

"Our team went with a hi-resolution still camera for shooting references and frames for creating the matte paintings of the Mumbai skylines. By shooting in digital hi-resolution format we could capture lot of actual life like details," Abhishek said.

To support the hi-resolution matte paintings with the number of atmospheric and particle effect layers, the studio had to work with the horsepower of Autodesk's latest Flame machines. Even that was difficult. "The kind of data that was flowing and way the layering was done was tremendous," Gaurav Gupta (CEO, Futureworks) says. "So we had to upgrade our whole infrastructure and pipeline. We needed faster network speeds to move data around, massively beefed up servers, and - the most important thing - increase RAM power and add render nodes for fast background rendering."

Along with Futureworks, Prime Focus has also done major work on the movie.