With Bollywood's new fixation for masala entertainers, 2012 bares witness to a visually effective year for post-production filmmakers. Over a dozen films were made this year, revived a style that's was only akin to the eighties. With state of the art technology available, visual effects and post-production studios such as Reliance MediaWorks Ltd. can create a multitude of possibilities to enhance the visual narrative of a film. The latest masala entertainer this year is Akshay Kumar's, Khiladi 786. Reliance MediaWorks Ltd., one of the largest post-production houses in India has delivered 42 minutes of visual effects work to augment the all-out action sequences for the film. Ranadheer Reddy, VFX Supervisor, manned a team of thirty artists with expert guidance from Creative Head Naveen Paul and VFX Head Prasad Sutar to deliver the visual effects process in an astounding three weeks time. Pankaj Kalbende and Sanjiv Naik, VFX Supervisors, were also involved due to the quantum of work. Vinoth Ganesh was heading the production along with VFX Producer Carrel D'souza. Talking about the magnitude of work and challenges involved Rana says, "We started working on the film on the first week of November and ended in the third week itself, the teams were bifurcated into compositors, clean-up artists and rotoscopic artist, adding upto a 30 member team dedicated to the project. Since there were multiple camera angles involved in the action scenes, we had around 5 different cameras rolling to shoot the actions sequences. We had cameras ranging from film to digital formats like Arri's 435 to Arri's Alexa and Red Epic that we dealt with. The challenging aspect is to make everything photo-realistic, and ensuring the finer details like the reflections, shadows are double checked and gel with the scene." Bollywood Hungama's Philip Bode gets VFX specialist, Rana, to take us behind the visual effects making process of Khiladi 786.
"The iron pole was placed as a reference point to confirm the twin's position" Towards the end of the film where Akshay meets his long lost twin, was again was made possible through multi-layered composites. To accomplish the interaction, the three principal actors talking to Akshay Kumar's twin were actually interacting with an iron pole. The iron pole was placed as a reference point to confirm the twin's position on screen; Akshay changed into costume and enacted the scene as the long lost twin. The camera movements and the timing of the different plates shot were mirrored, composited and rendered to obtain the final output.
"While the CGI car was modeled, textured and animated in Maya" Another interesting shot in the climatic sequence where Akshay Kumar power-bombs Azad into a car that collapsed, called for a combination of VFX elements and camera tracking put together. The principal actor was shot separately, while the CGI car was modeled, textured and animated in Maya which consisted of a separate plate together. We merged the layers and synced the timing of the impact again, to add effect to the narrative of the scene. We also added FX fillers like dust particles.
"We ensured that we recreated the exact same location digitally" We carried out various set extensions such as the Haji Ali sequence, when Azad is freed from incarcerations and reconciles with Asin (Indu). It was not possible to shoot the scene at Haji Ali Road itself, as we were not granted permission. We shot the entire sequence at film city in Mumbai with all the principal actors across a chroma environment; we shot live action footage of various areas around Mumbai including Haji Ali, the same way we shot the scene with the principal actors. We ensured that we recreated the exact same location digitally. Chandrakant Shenoy, Matte Painter, accentuated the visuals further by creating matte paints as seen behind Akshay in the scene. Matching the night lighting conditions with the visual effects elements was challenging, the layers were later merged and finalized.
"The thugs attacking plate was shot at 48 frames per second" In the dhaba flashback scene, the protagonist trashes the thugs who attack them in a blinding quick fashion. To accentuate the scene, the thugs attacking plate was shot at 48 frames per second, while Akshay Kumar's plate was shot at the normal 24 frames per second. This multiple composite scene involved around 8 live action plates where each attacker was shot separately where they were rigged up with wires that pulled them behind. This was done to capture the high speed action that was needed for this scene where the layers were merged and rendered out.