"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."
"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."
"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."
"We incorporated a combination of elastic and snappy characters"
"Before the animation production on the feature began, the animators were trained for almost six months. Acting workshops were conducted for the animators in the studio, since the animation style of the movie is in the midst of being toony and realistic; we had certain guidelines for the animators to follow that would complement the character designs. We incorporated a combination of elastic and snappy characters, and ensured that we didn't break the credibility of the characters such as making quadrupeds walk on two legs. We decided to go with our typical cultural mannerism and gestures that everyone in the country India could relate with." We knew that we only had one shot at creating memorable characters, but we pondered over how we could design the characters, that would gel with the Indian spectators and how they could relate with the characters. With this, we coined the term 'realistic but stylized' in which we realized the importance of striking a perfect balance between keeping it loony and extremely realistic. Although the characters appear to be quite simple in form, the addition of fur on the characters gives it an edge. In proportion to their body, we went for bigger heads. We wanted them to have expressive eyes and we also didn't want any of our characters to resemble the real actors. We want people to remember Bajrangi, Alex in their animated form and not as Govinda or Akshay Khanna.