Releasing on 24th October, Roadside Romeo is a landmark movie for the Indian Animation Industry and the entire Community is eagerly wishing for its success. It is co-produced by Yash Raj Films (YRF) Studio and Hollywood studio Walt Disney Co. It is visualised, executed and delivered by a 150-member team of Tata group's Tech arm Tata Elxsi.
The Storyline
This is the story of Romeo. A dude who was living the life. He had the works – the mansion to live in, the chicks to party with and the cars to be driven around in. Until one day, the family he was the favourite pet of, decided to move and left him back, abandoned on the mean streets of Mumbai. Romeo is now faced with situations he has never been in before. He encounters four strays, who scare the daylights out of him. But soon, he smooth talks his way into their hearts and he makes friends. Then, Romeo finds love! He encounters the beautiful, ravishing Laila, the most beautiful girl he has ever seen... and he loses his heart to her at first sight! And finally, he encounters a villain! The dreaded Don of the area – Charlie Anna! The Don who everyone is scared of. So hop on to the adventure as Romeo, wins friendship, love and a new life – inspite of Charlie Anna and his gang!
Watch how Romeo turns into – Roadside Romeo!
This Diwali – Get ready for a barking good time!!
Now, let's go behind the scenes and actually give you a treat EXCLUSIVE "Behind the Scenes - Roadside Romeo". We caught up with the key people behind the movie, Jugal hansraj: The Writer and the Director, Anshul Chobey: the Director of Photography, Pankaj Khandpur: Creative Director, Tata ELXSI VCL and Srirang and Sohail, the Animation Directors for the film.
CGT : First of all congratulations to the entire team behind Roadside Romeo and the entire community is very excited about the movie. So, tell us a little bit about how much time did it take to complete this project and how big was the team involved behind it.
Jugal : Well, we essentially started talking to TATA ELXSI VCL and started working on the project around Jan 2007 , but the initial design ideas and concept sketches had been going on since Aug 2006. Pankaj : RR comprises of around 1400 Shots ( close to 40 Scenes ) and 5 beautiful songs in the 95 mins of Screen time. We had at peak time close to 150 artists involved in all the different departments and during the last few months we have around 75 artists working on RR.
CGT : So, Jugal how did the movie idea come into your mind and how did it materialise? How are you feeling now that the project is done and soon to be released across screens in India on October 24th?
Jugal : Well, I was stuck in a traffic jam in Mumbai once and I saw some stray dogs playing near a garbage pile. They were running behind scooters and seemed so happy and oblivious of the world around them. They were so involved in their own game that I thought how about telling their story and that's how the idea of Roadside Romeo came to me. The movie wasn't planned actually. I love animation films and I used to be very fascinated by how they are made. I used to buy all books and DVDs on animation. At the same time, Adi (Aditya Chopra), who is a very good friend of mine since college days, wanted to make an animation film in India that was completely for the Indian audience. Considering my love for animation, he approached me and I wrote some ideas for him and he liked 'Roadside Romeo' a lot and asked me to start developing the project. It took me 20 drafts before the film got finalised
Well, I am having butterflies in the stomach as the release date is approaching. There is fear and a bit of apprehension too as it is my debut project but still I am sure people will like the movie. It's a fun-filled movie for both kids and adults and has been made for them to have a good time
Pankaj : Well, Roadside Romeo is India's first ever three-dimensional (3D) mainstream animation venture following a classic bollywood formula as compared to prior mythological or 2d film. This is India's first real 3d animated feature film. We are very proud that it is the first big one coming from an Indian Studio.
CGT : Tata VCL's Creative Director Pankaj Khandpur then took us through the entire Process of creating this Feature.
The essential process can be broken down into the following stages -
Pankaj : As you can see from the characters now, Jugal came to us with a very detailed brief how he wanted the main Story Protagonists to look like. The first character that fell into the hand of our Creative Duo - Srirang and Sohail was Romeo. As it was the main hero, we started experimenting and doodling with various styles and sketches and concept arts for the character which were all hand drawn. We looked at lots of references and actually went around looking at the behaviour of number of stray dogs before we froze on the final design.
Jugal : I think, i should surely mention Pankaj's dog Jiggy Khandpur which definitely served a great reference for all of us.
Pankaj : Well, once the character Sketch was finalised, Srirang and Sohail did the Color Art and then our Technical Director Ravi Datla and his team went on to create a wired mesh and then a grey shaded version 3D model of Romeo which once approved by Jugal went on to the Rigging department.
There was a lot of patience required by Jugal and team as only grey models were shown and a great deal of foresight and visualisation was required.
Then it was textured only using normal textures. But Jugal and the Yash team and rest were clear that we should do a benchmark quality product and we shud be proud of what we do. So, we decided to make characters with fur which are very complex as it means building and dealing with millions of polygons which are hugely expensive from a computational point of view. Again, as the characters got animated, the Fur had to be dynamic and react to the actions and external forces like wind etc which made it even more complicated.
Similarly all the charcters got made from concept to finish. I think Romeo was the first and Laila was the last to be created...
Background Design
Pankaj : Similarly Backgrounds were also designed. Sohail and his team worked on BG art. When initially Jugal was narrating the story, we would brainstorm on where should the story be based in, but then all of us almost instantly agreed that it should be placed in the Mumbai that we pass through and relate to day in day out, somewhat middle class Mumbai. The Mumbai that we wanted to potray was the streets that we pass through every day, like in older mumbai, which jugal felt had more charm but we also made sure that there was the urban touch to the skyline as well. It seemed the appropiate setting for our strays with the detailed textures and old charismatic rooftops.
There was also a technical angle to it. Today's apartment and office buildings usually don't have a ground floor whereas as per the script all activities were happening at Street level which then needed to be interesting.
And if you see, the most interesting ground floors can be found in places like the Chawls in Old Mumbai. Also, Jugal's whole idea of Romance was usually based on rooftops. So, instead of flat terraces, we designed these detailed, mangalore style sloped rooftops when you see the film. We have actually incorporate the huge amount of details of daily life in Mumbai like Pan Stains on the walls, the rusty pipes, potholes and the Kachra on the road.
We wanted to root our locations in a sort of fairy tale reality as Jugal had imagined.
Here is an image that can take you through the various stages of Background design starting from initial Pencil Sketch art to Color art, Greyscale Shaded, textured and the final Lit set.
Rigging
Pankaj : In basic terms, Rigging is the basic musculature that goes into the character that allows the animators to control its movements as well as its facial features.
Earlier designs done by Srirang and Sohail defines the range os motions and facial expressions of each of the characters so that the rigging was done accordingly in the 3D space. This again was very sophisticated because of the requirement of squash and stretch in the musculature controls of the characters as per the animation design defined by the animation characters. Because of the need of the stretch and squash, we couldn't constraint the characters to pure human motions and..
hence we couldn't do justice to the animation design if we had used traditional motion capture technique for animation. Though we had considered it very early in the process as well, but later on we decided to go with an entirely keyframe animation driven form of animation.
Also, in order to help parallelise the Workflow, we had to build a number of proprietary tools but still, we tried to keep the process as linear as possible so that we don't have any assets going back in the pipeline once it had been finalised.
Animation
Pankaj : The process that we followed for animation was as follows -
-Storyboards were done
-The boards were then edited and an audio track added on to it which gave us our final animatics
- Based on the animatics shots were created in 3d space and layouts with cameras were created in 3D space. This is where the Director of Photography, Anshul came into picture. From then on, Anshul and Jugal would sit together and decide for each shot where the camera has to be placed in the 3D space and what lens to be used to do ustice to the story.
- The 3D team led by Srirang and Sohail would then help the creative team so that the shots with the fixed camera would also have the characters placed in static poses.
- Then, many of our in house animators would act out the shot so that these performances could be used as video reference to animate.
- Based on the video references and the camera angles, the animators blocked out the basic key poses of the characters which were then smoothened and the final animation was presented to Jugal in Greyscale.
Voice over and Star Performance
Jugal : Well, from a performance point of view, the video references of the actual voice over actors also helped the animators a lot. We actually had the stars, Saif, Kareena and Javed as well as the other voice over artists come in even before the storyboard had started. We would put them on camera in front of the mike and they had to act out their dialogues as well as respond to the dialogues spoken out by their counterparts so that we could use their expressions and gestures for reference.
For song sequences, me and Anshul actually shot with the choreographer and his team and then edited and did shot division so that it could be used as reference for the animators.
Pankaj : Even all the dance sequences were hand animated and keyframed by the animators because, we couldn't get the range of motions that was required out of the characters if we had been restricted to traditional motion capture techniques. One of the songs, " Choole Na" in fact had almost 300 characters with detailed textures and fur and took the longest time in production.
Srirang and Sohail :
If you ask about the style of animation in RR, we just wanted to do justice to the characters and make them independently recognise among the audience. Also, this was the first feature so we didn't want to experiment too much but stay with the basic animation principles. Overall the style has been traditional disney but of course with the Indian Characteristics instilled in it. Almost all the character styles were derived from what we see around us in our daily life. Once you know the back story of the character, it becomes easier to put in the style to the basic actions of the character. For example, there is a character "Chainnu" who has a walk which is very unnatural and almost impossible to get a real life reference, but we actually got it working when we saw a beggar on the street with a similar walk and because we intentionally made it almost float on the ground, avoiding contact on the ground.
Laila was actually the toughest character to emote as it had the subtlest of actions as compared to all other characters which were very over the top. We are glad that we were able to do justice to the husky, sensous character of Kareena into Laila.
Pankaj :One of the best compliments that we are getting is that we have been able to show traits of Saif in Romeo, Kareena in Laila and Javed in Charlie. We tried and hopefully have been able to capture the essence of the actors in the characteres
Also, it was a great blessing in disguise to have Jugal as the director as he is an actor himself. So at any time we had any problem with the performance of any character, he could just act it out himself in front of the artists.
Lighting and Compositing
Background Lighting
Pankaj: A separate team was working on developing the background locations in the 3d space as per the colored designs created by the pre production team. This again was a complex process and a number of passes was generated so that Jugal and Anshul could have complete freedom and control on the individual settings at the compositing stage. Here is an example of the passes that were generated by the BG team -
Character Lighting
Similarly the characters were also lit and rendered in multiple passes, like Key, Fill, Global Illumination, Eye, Reflection, Rim, Occlusion and Props lights to name a few..
Pankaj - Hats off to Jugal for the amount of patience and faith that he had to wait till the entire process and view it in the various phases to finally see the rendered image.
So, after all the passes are rendered out, we composited all the layers (on an average of around 50 layers per shot) and Color corrected the final image.
Rendering
Pankaj : The rendering stage is a hugely CPU intensive process. This demanded huge computational prowess. Although we have quite a large renderfarm of almost around 500 CPUs in house, but still we realised that this would not be enough to churn out the number of renders we required in the amount of time scheduled. Thankfully, we had our sister Company, COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH LAB ( CRL) in Pune who have the world's 4th fastest Supercomputer come to the rescue and we were soon rendering the movie in record time with an incredible number of almost CPUs( almost 4000 at peak times).
CGT : So, Pankaj which character was the most challenging to work with in RR? Pankaj : Well, I would say that Laila was the toughest to mainly because of two reasons. First of all, Jugal wanted the female lead to have Long hair which is a very complicated technically to handle. SO, we had to write proprietary collision detection tools which alarmed the animators with a RED COLORED wire mesh anytime there was any intersection between Laila's hair and her body. Thanks to the Software Engineers at TATA ELXSI, we have a strong tech team, some of whom in fact have been part of the Academy award team for co-developing Alias Wavefront Maya Software. - Secondly, Laila was designed to be this white glistening Damsel which meant that we had to take extra precaution during lighting in order to avoid any kind of burnout because of the colour. At times we had to control the highlights or event the nature of the texture of Laila's hair and body so as to maintain the proper look to her character.
Visual Effects
Pankaj: There was a lot of Water, Smoke and dust effects that had to be done in RR as well. But as VCL does a lots of VFX for live action films all around the year as well, this was well taken care of by the VFX team.
But yes, Wet Fur was something that was really complicated and we had to restrict to only a couple of shots as it would have taken a longer time in order to implement that in more shots.
Cinematography
CGT : So, Anshul were you involved right from the boarding stage or did you come in later? How was it different compared to working in a live action environment?
Anshul : Well, I came in a little later when the animatics had already been done. I actually started off when the camera blocking started somewhere around April 2007 and that helped. For me , i had more inputs to give in the process in the 3d space where i could guide the team to place the cameras correctly in the 3d space rather than be restricted only to a 2d animatics canvas. Initially, i had no idea how the entire process worked as this is my first animated feature, but thanks to pankaj, i quickly got an overview and was able to grasp the virtual Cinemaography space quickly and was able to communicate to the team what i wanted.
Also, there was a major back and forth process because unlike live action, one couldn't just put on a light and see the effect.I had to patiently wait for the final image to come up and then maybe go back and make any changes if required. But the major plus point was that because it was entirely virtual, there was far more control over the camera and the lighting. In principle, it was the same.
Role of Disney and Merchandising
Pankaj : Disney came in later in the process after we had started work on the film. Their main contribution has been in setting up the production planning and reporting process which very much streamlined the way updates were done among all the involved parties of VCL and Yash Raj in Mumbai as well as Disney in Los Angeles. They had a daily update of how the production was going on. They also helped us from their expertise point of view and sent expats come down to help plug in loopholes if any in the production .
They have also contributed in a big way in the merchandising aspect. RR's merchandising range of products have been recently launched and are now available in the market .
The product range encompasses apparels, accessories, footwear, jewellery, school products, stationery, personal utility, linen, toys story books and activity books in the price range of Rs 49 – Rs 39,000.
Popley will launch Roadside Romeo jewellery range which comprises of diamond studded Romeo and Laila pendants which are priced between Rs 26000 to Rs 39000.
Apart from this, Disney has tied up with Catmoss for apparel such as tshirts, skirts and jeans, with Bodycare for innerwear and with Lakhani for footwear. HM International will retail the line-up of Roadside Romeo stationary products such as note books, lunch boxes, water bottles, coin banks, pencil boxes, CD cases etc which will be retailed out of Big Bazar and Lifestyle.
Portico - Creative Mobus will launch the Roadside Romeo bed sheet collection and Hot Mugs will launch the mugs capturing the themes, motifs and characters of the movie. Disney has also launched an interactive range of Roadside Romeo toys including puzzles, maze, etc with Cyber shop. DCP has partnered with Excel to launch a host of books such as coloring, copy, activity, sticker etc in the market.
CGT : So, Which character do you think is the most interesting in RR?
Pankaj : Charlie Anna, for sure. He is the star of the show. Outstanding both from the design point of view and the creative control that we had given the animators as well as the kind of attribute that Jugal had assigned to a character like Charlie Anna. A hero because of being the hero, at times can't do certain things. But Charlie Anna's character as a villian was also like a counter point to the hero. So, narratively, he is an incredibly strong character. And when you see the film, you will have more and more people falling in love with him.
Jugal : Well, all the character's have their strong points and even the performance of the main actors, Saif, Kareena and Javed were a real boost to them.
Javed's performance has in fact i think added and taken the character of Charlie Anna one up. His over the top characteristic suits the animation paradigm perfectly.
Well, if you ask me about the design of Charlie Anna or any of the dogs, then we did have an encyclopedia of Dogs just for a visual reference but the Design team freaked out on creating the best visual hybrids and their own versions. I am really thankful to have found such a strong team to have worked with and am sure that with the kind of experience i have had in this virtual form of entertainment, i would be looking forward to more projects in the future.
CGT : Thanks a lot Jugal, Pankaj, Srirang and Sohail and Anshul to have spared time with us and shared in a such a detailed manner the behind the scenes of Road Side Romeo. Thanks to Swaratmika Mishra from Yash Raj as well as Devnath from TATA Elxsi - VCL for making this feature article possible. Guys, lets wish the entire team the very best.. and RACE TO WATCH THE MOVIE ON 24TH OCTOBER..
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