How they made VFX for Yamla Pagla Deewana

What do you get when Dharmendra, Sunny, and Bobby are cast in the same film? The answer’s simple, you get Yamla Pagla Deewana. Director Samir Karnik has managed to rope in the comical trio, Read More">four years after their stint together in Anil Sharma’s Apne. Apart from the arty shots and other creative inputs that makeRead More

What do you get when Dharmendra, Sunny, and Bobby are cast in the same film? The answer's simple, you get Yamla Pagla Deewana. Director Samir Karnik has managed to rope in the comical trio, four years after their stint together in Anil Sharma's Apne. Apart from the arty shots and other creative inputs that make up the successful film, YPD has another contributing factor to thank for, namely VFX. Produced by Samir Karnik and Nitin Manmohan, the VFX in the film is contributed by Mumbai based Intermezzo studios.

Sandeep Kamal, the VFX supervisor and creative director of Intermezzo Studios supervised a few visual effects shots for Samir's Nanhe Jaisalmer in 2007. With this endeavor, it was only a matter of time until the VFX stalwart bagged Samir's latest comic caper Yamla Pagla Deewana.

Shot in Patiala and Filmcity, the film has over 150 VFX, CGI and clean up shots, the team at Intermezzo wrapped up the project in one months time with finesse. "Although it's a comedy film, Samir didn't want the VFX to look tacky or loud" says Sandeep, on the look of the VFX in the film.

This tightly scheduled VFX pipeline was organized by Yash Talwar and Marc D'Souza, creative and executive producer of intermezzo studios. "We adopted quite a flexible production pipeline so that we could optimize the flow of shots through the pipe, depending on the resources we had available and the inflow of the shots from the lab" says Marc on the production pipeline.

In this exclusive case study, Bollywood Hungama takes you behind the scenes on how they executed the visual effects for Yamla Pagla Deewana. Courtesy Sandeep Kamal, Yash Talwar, Marc D'Souza, Rahul Vishwakarma, Intermezzo Studios.

The Titanic spoof This shot required multiple plates; the actors were shot against chroma backgrounds, where the shots were composited on to a CGI Titanic deck. The live action shot was tracked to derive the camera motion data, Read More">which was then used to remodel the camera in the 3D space. Water and smoke simulations wereRead More

The Titanic spoof

This shot required multiple plates; the actors were shot against chroma backgrounds, where the shots were composited on to a CGI Titanic deck. The live action shot was tracked to derive the camera motion data, which was then used to remodel the camera in the 3D space. Water and smoke simulations were added and combined with the live action plates to make the shot flawless. The final shot was color corrected to give the action a dreamy appearance.

Climax The climax of the comic caper had an astounding sixty shots; the shots which involved camera movements were tracked like the other sequences. The main challenge involved was wire removal for the complex stunts and fights shots. Subsequently, Read More">the clean up plates were used to remove the wires. Some of the shots in theRead More

Climax

The climax of the comic caper had an astounding sixty shots; the shots which involved camera movements were tracked like the other sequences. The main challenge involved was wire removal for the complex stunts and fights shots. Subsequently, the clean up plates were used to remove the wires. Some of the shots in the climax scene required set extensions; the team at Intermezzo tackled this difficult task by using matte paintings to extend d the set. To enhance the credibility of the shots, smoke was added using CG.

Canada House This modern typical North American house was constructed at Filmcity, where the set was shot against massive chroma backgrounds and the exterior was remade by compositing a stock footage plate of Canada provided by the client. This shot involved keying the background, rotoscopy of the characters, Read More">and color correction to blend it withRead More

Canada House

This modern typical North American house was constructed at Filmcity, where the set was shot against massive chroma backgrounds and the exterior was remade by compositing a stock footage plate of Canada provided by the client. This shot involved keying the background, rotoscopy of the characters, and color correction to blend it with the environment. Tracking was required for a few shots that had camera movements.

The Pot Breaker In the same bar sequence Paramvir (Sunny), Read More">smashes the pots that are hurled right at him. It comes as no surprise that the pots were created in CGI. The dynamics of the broken fragments were simulated to recreate the Matrix’s pause like feel. High Dynamic Range Mapping (HDRI) a technique used toRead More

The Pot Breaker

In the same bar sequence Paramvir (Sunny), smashes the pots that are hurled right at him. It comes as no surprise that the pots were created in CGI. The dynamics of the broken fragments were simulated to recreate the Matrix's pause like feel. High Dynamic Range Mapping (HDRI) a technique used to get a dynamic range of luminance, was used to match the lighting of the live action footage.