"Pre-production began with ideating about the character sketches"
"Nikhil was very clear that it should be portrayed in a Bollywood way from the start and after a few months we were presented with a one page story called, Delhi safari by Nikhil Advani. We liked the concept instantly, and knew there was a lot of potential in it. Pre-production began with ideating about the character sketches and the whole plot; basic briefs on the main characters were provided describing what he was looking in their personas. Along with this, Nikhil was working on the scripts with his team. Plenty of table read sessions were carried out to improvise the script with dialogues; it took about a year to finalize the entire script. During the initial meetings, we had various rounds of discussions on the process of animation with Nikhil. As it was his first animation directorial, it was imperative that he understood the animation production pipeline thoroughly, towards the end of the production of the film, we decided to give the movie a stereoscopic angle as well. The stereoscopic process of the film lasted eight months because we didn't go for the typical 3D conversion process, but actually rendered the second eye perspective and conducted extensive work on over 120 shots".
"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."