Indian VFX industry needs financial support

VFX is a specialised field, which requires a detailed look at many things such as the visual representation of the characters and so on. In India, we have the talent, but compared to international VFX, we need to look more into the quality of special-effects and its detailing. But we tend to stop at about 90 or 95 percent and don’t concentrate on the last five or 10 per cent of detailing. This is because of the budget allocated to us besides also the time crunch. Here detailing means how a photo-realistic creature is created in films such as the tiger in Roar The Tigers of Sunderbans and Life of Pi, where the creation looks so real that it fools the audience convincingly. The form of the creature, the fur details, the claws, everything associated with the creature requires to be crisp and perfect.
I believe we can match up to the same standards as our international counterparts if we have similar kind of budget and time span to develop the special effects for a movie. If a team of Indians would have worked on a film like Life of Pi, we could also have done a similar job with the resources that they had. Also it is very important to note that most of the work on the tiger for Life of Pi was outsourced to India itself. Which clearly implies that we can also work to produce similar quality of VFX in Bollywood as well.
Life of Pi and Gravity, I think, would serve as ideal benchmarks for the Indian movies to aim at while thinking about the quality of VFX. It was a good attempt by the makers of RA One, Krissh 3 and Roar to meet the standard of the West. The VFX work in Roar is impressive and very realistic, it’s a step towards the effects done in the West and I am impressed by it but we were still a little off the mark.
I feel we can match their standards soon and make better VFX-based films. The new technologies such as motion capture, 3D scanning and virtual cameras are available in the market. We just need more financial support to gain access to them.
I believe that the future of Indian VFX is bright and it is just a matter of time before we set a new benchmark for ourselves. While our international counterparts have researched extensively for films like Gravity and Avatar, similarly we need to adapt their style of research and technology and implement them in our films so as to make our product of that standard or even better.

As told to Karan Shah