After being in production for almost five years, Nikhil Advani's debut animation directorial venture, Delhi Safari has finally seen the light of day, with seducing Indian spectators to throng cinemas. The film revolves around the subject of deforestation, with five animals traveling from Mumbai to Delhi to fight for their home from being encroached upon by builders. The film is being lauded as the best animation film to come out of India yet, abetting to its success is Pune based Krayon Pictures that started up with Delhi Safari. Nishith Takia, Co-founder of Krayon Pictures along with Arpan Gaglani, the Creative Director, headed a team of 200 odd artists to churn out 1800 shots that made up the entire Movie. Talking about the 5 year ordeal in making the animation feature Nishith says, "We started out in November 2007 and the last shot of the film was delivered December of 2010. Thereafter, we spent six months in making it 3D stereoscopic here at Krayon, we've also had Vikramaditya Motwane along with a horde of writers on board the team to accomplish our mission. The film also has the credit of roping in an ensemble cast consisting of Akshaye Khanna, Boman Irani, Suniel Shetty, Prem Chopra, and Urmila Matondkar amongst others. Bollywood Hungama's Philip Bode gets Nishith Takia along with Arpan Gaglani to talk about, the magnitude of the animation work involved in making Delhi Safari.
"I think making an animation film of this scale in India is challenging in itself. The most important thing for Krayon was that we worked in what we believed in. We did not have references in terms of revenues, cost considerations etc. We just did everything to make the film what we believed it should be. There are challenges in marketing an animated film, finding distributors and buyers, with the kind of faith system that you need to support an animated film. So, making and marketing an animated film like Delhi Safari, will always remain challenging for some time. However, we have overcome those challenges with the film receiving great reviews."
"We had some technical bug in PUPPET and animators refused to work without it"
"During the production of Delhi Safari, we had tons of scripts for artist automation. With it, we developed our own propriety asset and pipeline management software from scratch, a Wikipedia type of internal knowledge site for artist called 'PUPPET' (Production Utilities and Project Pipeline Enhancement Tool). It followed a very simple rule for all the different departments in the animation studio, 'Clean in & clean out'. An artist should invest all his time in creatives rather than, file and technical management. PUPPET ensured that all processes follow convention according to the pipeline made, it even sanitized and labeled the entire file by itself and does not bother the artist to correct it. This software helped us immensely in the production of Delhi Safari. This process was smooth, efficient and most important of all, it got rid of human errors. It had become such an integral part of our pipeline that, at one point we had some technical bug in PUPPET and animators refused to work without it. The entire production was stopped till we fixed it."
"With some initial tests and feedback from animators on what was working for them in the character rigs and what wasn't, the riggers on board would go back and improvise he rigs. This process continued until the animators were completely satisfied with the rigs. With the quality benchmark of the film set up high we did not want the characters to move around like rigid robots, so we set up muscle controllers on the face and the torsos of the characters. A pose library was made for the animators, and the rigs were programmed using Mel and Python scripts to enable squash and stretch properties on the character's mesh which did not disturb the character's volume. The biggest challenge was Alex, the parrot rig. Alex is a parrot, but knows how to speak with humans. He had feathers where he uses them while expressing himself talking to humans and other animals. That rig took almost 3 months to reach the production quality."
"It would take an average of 6 hours time to render out per frame"
"Lighting in CGi is really fun if you are supported with best tools and the most importantly, the rendering software. The freedom to use a series of myriad lights and extracting the desired result is very satisfying. One needs to be technically sound or may end up spending extra hours of rendering which would increase production expenses. For every sequence, a master shot was lit and composed to get the right mood, it served as reference to follow for lighting up the other shots. We estimated that it would take an average of 6 hours time to render out per frame, averaging each shot with about 80 passes in lighting."