13 July 2011 | Posted By Animation Focuz
The Brief
Pixion, a 100% subsidy of Century Communication Ltd. is pushing the boundaries of the industry by delivering cutting edge VFX and DI in its current movies. Recently, Pixion has delivered Double Dhamaal that has been widely appreciated in the industry. The initial brief of the movie mentioned the scope of huge visual treatment and at the same time the challenge was to make the visual effects seamless to the audience.
Locations
The movie was shot on film in Macau and Mumbai. There are above 700 VFX shots in the movie.
Project
Mr. Naveen Paul was the VFX supervisor for the movie and was completely involved creatively and technically from the day of commencement. Mr. Naveen Paul said, “ Double Dhamaal has about 20 mins of Green scene sequence. There are many outdoor sequences that are shot in Mumbai but portrayed as Macau in the movie. There were lot of Multiplate composites, crowd multiplication and CG elements in the movie. As an on set supervisor, we ensured hassle free execution and noted down lens info, Camera height, Camera angle, Camera Move etc. Infact for every VFX sequence, the look was first created and shared with the director. With the support of well renowned DOP, Mr. Aseem Bajaj we have been able to deliver successfully the directors visualised thoughts”.
Mr. Ranadheer Reddy, Associate VFX supervisor, said, “I accompanied Double Dhamaal team to Macau and Hong Kong for onset VFX supervision. I had taken MACAU city photographs for reference to create CG MACAU backdrop of day and night, this helped us to generate the real environment.
Timelines
Double Dhamaal has about 60 minutes of VFX and about 70 Compositors and 12 Cgi artists. Pixion delivered the project within a span of 3 Months.
Description of some shots
Bombay City Chroma – Sanjay Dutt’s office (interior) shown in the first half of the film was shot against green screen. We had to show the office at the 20th floor surrounded by commercial high rise buildings of Mumbai. There are shots where the four characters(Arshad,Ritesh,javed,Ashish) are hanging on the office window from outside the building. This was again shot against Green screen. There were two challenges:
1) To show the height from where they were hanging.
2) To recreate the entire ambience of the city with traffic and commercial complexes. This was achieved by combination of cgi and lives.
Macau city\day\Night chroma – This was again at Sanjay Dutts office in Macau. The Macau city was to be shown on one side and Casino on the other side. Here we had to develop two looks for the day and night shots.
We had reference pictures of the buildings in Macau taken by Mr. Ranadheer Reddy and hence they were modelled and textured accordingly.
Bombay to Macau – We had shot few exterior sequences in Mumbai that were later made to look like Macau in the film. There was extensive work on such shots. We did not shoot it against chroma as we wanted live ambience, especially lighting for the real look. There was huge amount of Rotoscopy, Cgi,Matte paints,Camera matchmoves.We are happy that it looks seamlessly photo real.
CGI
Mr. Viral Thakkar, CG Head said, “There was extensive use of Cgi and we had to create Mumbai and Macau buildings as a background for the chroma sequences. This was achieved by creating Cg models of the building in 3D and matte paints and sometimes a combination of both. We had to maintain everything as real, like the perspective of the plane, horizon, depth, lighting and texturing of the buildings etc. Apart from these, there were outdoor sequences shot in Mumbai which were changed to Macau locations.
Some other contributors to the high quality VFX and DI are Pankaj Kalbande (Comp supervisor), Chandrakanth Shenoy (matte painter), Sarika Ali (compositing Lead), Sudhir Tripathi ( CG Lead), Swapnil Dhawre ( Production Manager ), Paul Byrne (DI Colourist) and Abhishek Goel (DI Line Producer)