Comedy and horror make for an unforgiving marriage. Get the timing wrong by a beat, and the scare turns into a snigger, or worse, a yawn. Bhooth Bangla had to nail both, and the heavy lifting fell largely to a small army of digital artists who never appear on screen.
Sidharth Priyadarsan, the film’s VFX supervisor and son of director Priyadarshan, worked alongside WRC Studios to deliver the film’s supernatural spectacle. Speaking to AnimationXpress, he said the brief was never simply to be scary or funny, but to stay true to the director’s vision from the outset.
The numbers tell their own story. Some 87 artists at WRC Studios, many with international credits behind them, worked through the production. Priyadarsan led the effort alongside fellow VFX supervisors Dipansu Halder and Rudra Mazumder, with Surajit Sen running asset creation as creative supervisor. The team liaised constantly with the director, cinematographer and production designer on everything from shot execution to how real each sequence needed to look.
The final tally: more than 700 VFX shots, built on a mix of practical sets and green-screen work. But the moment the film tips into its supernatural register, almost nothing on screen is real. Every creature and ghostly entity, Priyadarsan confirmed, was generated entirely by computer.
The climax was the toughest stretch by far. It packed in set extensions, full CG environments, digital doubles of both characters played by Akshay Kumar, face replacements, CG wings, roto-paint work, smoke and fire simulations, lightning, debris destruction, and the creation of the film’s spirit, Vadhusur. By Priyadarsan’s reckoning, the sequence ran through more or less the entire VFX toolkit in one go.
He rates the project among the most demanding VFX undertakings made in India, citing the sheer breadth of techniques: creature builds, digital doubles, FX-driven simulations, rigid-body destruction, crowd effects, water simulations, creature animation, invisible effects, CG set extensions and de-ageing. Every creature and double, he noted, was rigged with its own muscle system for believable movement.
Yet the film nearly lost the room before it found its footing. A rough cut, shown to producers a month or two after wrapping, landed badly. Priyadarsan recalled that some onlookers had effectively written the film off there and then. With most of the VFX still unfinished, the footage looked unfinished too, lacking the layer that would eventually pull it together. The team, he said, could see the finished film in their heads even when nobody else could.
The final screening flipped the script entirely. The reaction, in his words, went from despair to disbelief, and the VFX work that had been invisible to early viewers suddenly became the thing everyone wanted to talk about.
WRC Studios isn’t pausing to celebrate. Bound by an NDA, Priyadarsan would say only that the studio is already deep into building a digital double for a major star on its next feature. On the evidence of Bhooth Bangla, that’s a project worth keeping an eye on.
