25 year old Los Angeles-based multiple Academy Award winning visual effects and animation studio, Rhythm & Hues (R&H) celebrated 10th year of its presence in India recently. R&H with two studios in India- Mumbai and Hyderabad and more facilities in Kuala Lumpur and Vancouver is known for its work in Hollywood feature films, as well as scientific and technical contributions to the industry.
In the past 2 years R&H has worked on Hollywood features like The A-Team, Yogi Bear, Little Fockers, Hop, Moneyball, Big Miracle and X-Men: First Class. The artists at the Rhythm & Hues’ studios in Mumbai and Hyderabad have had a hand in the production of these features be it as FX artists, compositors, animators, modelers, look-dev artists, lighters and so on.
Some of the recent works of R&H include transformations of the characters like Mystique and Emma Frost in the latest X-Men movie, crowd generation and replication for the huge stadium shots in the baseball-and-statistics drama Moneyball, dealing with stereoscopic compositing for the first time in Yogi Bear, and even creating fully CG shots for a significant portion of the Easter Bunny movie Hop.
Big Miracle, a family-drama about a small Alaskan town attempting to rescue whales stranded in the ice, involved a lot of 2D-intensive work. Many of the icy landscapes seen in the film were in fact set extensions, merging matte paintings with practical footage. There was also some CG makeup applied on the whales shot on set with digitally-added wounds, while FX spray was added on animatronic whales. There was also some work removing markers and green-screens, and where there were no or partial green-screen used in the shots a lot of previz rotoscope had to be done.
Another film that relied on the expertise of Rhythm & Hues’ compositors was the action comedy Knight & Day, of which 75 shots were done in the Hyderabad studio. The film features international locations, but was in fact largely shot in Los Angeles with its stars, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, which then required a lot of green-screen work. As a result, probably the biggest challenge for the team of compositors was the large amount of green-screen pulls and compositing of background and foreground elements shot from separate locations that they needed to deliver in a tight schedule.
With the ever growing and challenging work being done out of the Indian facilities, there was a need to expand the Mumbai facility to accommodate a larger workforce of artists. As always Rhythm & Hues has been on the look out for some really passionate artists who could contribute to its already talented group of people. Some of the projects that are currently in production in the Mumbai facility are Life of Pi and Snow White and the Huntsman, apart from several other projects which are in the offing.
