One cannot call this as the Kannada film industry’s answer to LOTR but a regional movie featuring a CG song and 40 minutes of VFX is no mean feat.
With a fantasy based plot that revolves around a kid and his late grandmother who is visible only to him, Magic Ajji is targeted primarily at children and family audiences. The movie releases early April in a bid to cash in on the summer holiday season.
Produced by Bangalore based Rajassu combines and directed by Dinesh Kumar, Magic Ajji has South Superstar Khushboo essaying the title role. The movie is completely shot in digital (Hi Def – SONY) with the technical support and Hi Def camera provided by Bangalore based Wizworks Multimedia. The Visual Effects for the movie have been jointly done by Wizworks and VFXring.
A veteran producer having produced more than 40 regional language movies under various banners, Rajjasu Combines Chief and Wizworks Chairman A N Subbaraju told Animation ‘xpress that, “There have been very few kids movies in Kannada of late. Majic Ajji is targeted at kids and family and is a fantasy based story with a lot of visual effects. When Hollywood can give good VFX movies, why not us too. We plan to remake this film in other regional languages including Hindi”
Describing the plot, Subbaraju explains,”The plot of the movie revolves around an ill treated kid and his late Ajji (Grandmother – played by Khushboo) who is visible onlyto him. Khushboo performs a lot of miracles and helps the kid fight the unjust treatment meted out to him”
Says VFXring director Chandru,”Everytime khusboo appears, she appears from nature. We took the five elements of water, fire , wind , sky, land as the concept and made her appear from twister or from fire or sand particles and from lightining and so on”
He adds, “Kusboo is visible only to the boy, so for every scene we had to make khusboo look transparent like crystal glass even while maintaining her features intact. For this we used different methods in compositing. Some shots even required 3d modelling for enhanced effects. We have also done a lot of tracking and match move”
“Our major work was in the song sequence, where we shot the whole song against green screen. Then we replaced the entire environment constructed in 3D. The concept for the song was that kusboo is taking the kids to different worlds the heaven, hell, space and underwater. We shot the greenscreen with crane and trolly cam moves, which were later tracked in 3D software to replicate the physical cam moves” he further added.
“We had a team of 25 artists working on for abt 6 months for the project. Our greatest advantage was that the producer of the film Mr. Subbaraju was very understanding on the CG workflow” concluded Chandru.
How Magic Ajji does at the box office remains to be seen, but a good showing could very well spur a spate of VFX oriented movies for kids.
Till April, fingers crossed.