Dostana & redchillies.vfx's invisible effects

Dostana & redchillies.vfx's invisible effects

Dharma Production's Dostana created ripples at the box office with the audience lining up to watch the sizzling trio of Abhishek Bachchan, John Abraham and Priyanka Chopra fall in and out of love against the picturesque Miami skyline. What the audience did not know and indeed, did not realize, was that all the indoor sequences of Priyanka's house were actually shot at Filmcity inside a studio in Mumbai! Here's what the director of Dostana, Tarun Mansukhani had to say about the VFX of the film, "The biggest drawback for redchillies.vfx is that their work is so unnoticeable. Some times I had to force them to deliberately put in shakes & jitters, so that the audience knows it's an effect and thus enjoy it more. Somebody once said to me 'If you're ever looking for someone in the animation or visual effects area, look for the guy who is spoken least about, cause its his work that will be closest to perfection.' and that is precisely what I found with redchillies.vfx." The effects in Dostana were made possible by some excellent compositing and VFX work by visual effects major redchillies.vfx. In a first of its kind VFX task in Indian cinema, a dedicated team of 80 artists worked on 300+ shots, including a very complex basketball game sequence and a host of other amazingly executed sequences.

“Nobody’s attempted something like this at this scale in India,” said Keitan Yadav talking about the scale of invisible effects in Dostana. “It’s a risk….hat’s off to Tarun for taking it & we are glad that we pulled it off” But if done correctly, it saves time, effort and money that would have been spent in retaining the cast and crew in Miami for another month.” redchillies team coordinated with Director of photography for the film Ayananka Bose in getting all the possible shots of the Miami skyline. When asked about his views on the vfx in the film Ayananka jokingly asked “There’s vfx in Dostana? ..The whole film was shot in Miami including the interiors as Dharma can afford such trival cost but not the expensive redchillies.vfx bill for CGI…he adds with a wink. “Miami plates were shot before the actual shoot in Mumbai. We would have liked it to be the other way but since we were in Miami before the Mumbai schedule & rather then coming back we decided to shoot the Miami skyline before the foreground shots. We made sure we had all the shots in different light conditions- morning, afternoon, twilight, sunset & night. Plus we had to make sure that the same lenses with matching focus were used for shots in a particular sequence,” quips Haresh Hingorani. The DOP’s unit made a bank of various shots including pans, changing axis and all light conditions as we wanted to make sure that we had all the options we wanted. Various day and night shots of the Miami skyline form a major part of the film’s drama. “All indoor scenes were shot inside a studio in Filmcity, Mumbai,” said Haresh. While compositing, the redchillies.vfx team faced various challenges: they had to make sure that the background stayed constant even while the camera changed axis, or panned. They had to take care of the city’s lights reflections. Haresh added, “We followed the actual axis and actors’ height in the indoor shots. Plus we took care of the eye-level when the camera was looking up or down."

In this sequence where Abhishek brings Priyanka to an amusement park, the filmmakers wanted the vfx team to create a grand amusement park. The original shot had a couple of merry-go-rounds only. The redchillies.vfx team used CGI and set extension to add many more colorful rides and lights to the park, thus giving the desired effect. The sequence took one month to execute. This shot, which was shot at a studio, uses set extension to depict Priyanka’s terrace house as part of a skyscraper. As the camera zooms out of Priyanka’s terrace, the rest of the building is all CG. While in post, the team had to make sure that glass windows on either side of the terrace reflected the Miami skyline.
This 2-minute long basketball sequence included 20-25 vfx shots and took almost 2 months to complete. The redchillies.vfx team decided against using crowd multiplication plug-ins and actually composited the crowd into the scene, one by one.

Talking about the level of difficulty involved in this sequence, Haresh said, “This was difficult that anything done before, especially given the fact that in the game of basketball the crowd is really close to the field, which makes the task of composting even more tricky."

“It took us one whole day to just shoot the basketball players,” he added. This scene is a crucial one in the film, where Abhishek and John tell Priyanka the truth about them being in love her, while the basketball goes on in the background.

Managing the crowd was a particularly difficult task as you could see the faces of people. redchillies.vfx compositors painstakingly added the crow to the empty stands, and made the crowd and the match a reality. The digital scoreboard was added later.

The studio also touched-up various shots in the film. Among others, it changed the color of Bobby Deol’s suit from brown to black in one of the sequences. This had to be done as the actor’s black suit couldn’t be found at the time of the shooting! In John Abraham’s 360 degree shot at the beach, the team used matt painting to remove a few stray items in the frame.

Tell him that redchillies.vfx perfected the art of concealment in this film, and Keitan says, “People have not got it. We have done our job.” He further said that using vfx as were used in Dostana is a major cost saving exercise but added that it can only be done in a movie which have a substantial scale. Besides the recently released Dostana, redchillies.vfx has also done the visual effects for forthcoming release Billu Barber. The Mumbai-based studio’s oeuvre also consists of award winning visual effects for Om Shanti Om and other blockbusters like Don and Chak De India.