Deconstructing VFX of MKBKM

Beehive Sequence In this scene, Matru (Imran Khan) is addressing a crowd when suddenly he sees Badal (Arya Babbar). On seeing him, he flings a stone at a beehive where the bees scatter all around, making the villagers including Badal run for their lives. For accentuating the beehive scene, Read More">we placed a dummy hive asRead More

Beehive Sequence

In this scene, Matru (Imran Khan) is addressing a crowd when suddenly he sees Badal (Arya Babbar). On seeing him, he flings a stone at a beehive where the bees scatter all around, making the villagers including Badal run for their lives. For accentuating the beehive scene, we placed a dummy hive as a reference point for dimensions along with a real looking dummy bee for the look and feel. Later on in post, a highly detailed swarm of bees were made in CG and animated using a combination of dynamics and key frame animation. The biggest challenge was to make it look credible. It was absolutely crucial to get the essential elements like textures, lighting and animation perfect.

Cessna Plane Crash One of the longest sequences in the film was where Harry takes Matru on a night flight aboard a two person Cessna aircraft, Read More">where both doors were removed. Shooting this sequence posed many practical challenges where VFX played the most crucial and problem solving role. The live shots of the actors inRead More

Cessna Plane Crash

One of the longest sequences in the film was where Harry takes Matru on a night flight aboard a two person Cessna aircraft, where both doors were removed. Shooting this sequence posed many practical challenges where VFX played the most crucial and problem solving role. The live shots of the actors in the plane were shot separately on a black screen, with a small green screen behind the plane's doors. We preferred to shoot this way rather than having an entirely green screen set-up to avoid troublesome green spills. In addition, to give a sense that it was floating, the camera was either hand-held or on a crane. We preferred this instead of rigging the camera to the plane, which would have given us shots that looked rather static and boring. Later on in post, these layers were composited over a night sky environment with clouds and the ground terrain with a few dim lights. This was entirely made as digital matte painted layers. We also added a CG propeller and did Cessna take-offs in CG, since airport did not allow us to fly in the night. In addition, various aerobatics were also executed as entire CG sequences. Towards the end of the scene, the plane's propeller needed to ignite which resulted in a fire, making the burning Cessna smash through a billboard and crash into the wheat field. The majority of shots in this section were carried out through extensive CG the plane, the hoarding, the crash, the billboard with lights etc. We built a highly detailed Cessna model in CG, along with fire and smoke dynamics attached to it.

Pink Buffalo For pre-production we did extensive preparations like making detailed storyboards, studying reference material and scouting locations. This was a well-planned project and the director has demonstrated his clarity of thought and expectation, Read More">one of the highlights of the movie was where Harry (Pankaj Kapur) frequently hallucinates and sees a Pink Buffalo. The buffaloRead More

Pink Buffalo

For pre-production we did extensive preparations like making detailed storyboards, studying reference material and scouting locations. This was a well-planned project and the director has demonstrated his clarity of thought and expectation, one of the highlights of the movie was where Harry (Pankaj Kapur) frequently hallucinates and sees a Pink Buffalo. The buffalo is either lying on his bed or walking up to Harry, chewing and even smiling at him. The brief was to make it look very tender and clean. It was crucial to position the buffalo exactly where intended while shooting, For example, in one scene the animal was to lie on the actor's bed, whereas in a party scene we needed the buffalo to walk between people. The next challenge was the buffalo constantly chewing and breaking into fleeting smiles. Since it was impossible to include the buffalo in the actual shots, we shot the buffalo as a separate layer. We modeled the buffalo's head in CG where we had the crucial task of making it look photo-realistic with textures, muscle movement, fur and realistic animation.

Although Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola did not fare well in the box-office, it has the credit of being one of the few Bollywood movies to have included a computer generated creature as part of its narrative. Prime Focus, one of India largest post-production houses, Read More">has delivered 593 VFX shots for Vishal Bhardwaj’s latest politicalRead More

Although Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola did not fare well in the box-office, it has the credit of being one of the few Bollywood movies to have included a computer generated creature as part of its narrative. Prime Focus, one of India largest post-production houses, has delivered 593 VFX shots for Vishal Bhardwaj's latest political lampoon feature film. Govardhan Vigraham, the visual effects supervisor of the film, led a team of thirty artists to work round the clock to deliver the visual effects in four months. Talking about work on the VFX process of the film, co-founder and chief creative director, Merzin Tavaria says, "Our mission was to assist the story with visual effects, and we achieved this successfully by surpassing very interesting challenges which involved, character animation, CG sequences, complex multilayer compositing, set extensions and intricate clean-ups. Bollywood Hungama's Philip Bode gets Govardhan Vigraham to help us deconstruct the VFX process of Matru Bijlee Ka Mandola.