A lot goes on in the world of VFX; we now have the chance to understand the technicalities and what goes on behind the scenes. Running Image Studio founder Mark Troy Dsouza shares his experience on the Aisha web series which involves the use of a lot of VFX. The story is about a brilliant application designer and his creation, Aisha the virtual assistant. Animation Xpress recently spoke to him and he shared his insights about the project.
The series A.I.S.H.A is India’s first web series to have this level of VFX. All her backgrounds, foregrounds and graphics are all VFX. Various softwares like Adobe After Effects, Nuke and PFtrack was used.
Dsouza said “Initially it took some time to understand the vision of the director (Sahir Raza). We had met a couple of times to get a brief from the direction team, after which things got smoother. After we got in to the flow, it used to take about two to three days to design, create and approve the same.”
Running Image is Mark Troy Dsouza’s own company which is run by his partner Pranil Mahajan. Pranil was the VFX supervisor on Aisha and Mark was the VFX producer for the series. Running Image Studio was looking forward to do something exciting and creative work. Raghu, Rajiv and Sahir visited the studio and then they knew Aisha was something that they had to be a part of. Mark had given his best and tried to create visuals that had never been done before in India and it worked. Post the redsponse in season one, Running Image Studio bagged season two as well.
During Dsouza’s discussion with Sahir, the brief was that Aisha had to browse through the data on internet. They came up with these spherical layers where she could access layers of information from the internet. So they planned to shoot in a way that would show her assets that would appear once she read the information she will slide it to another world on the web itself. Once in the studio, they tracked the cameras and used around four to five layers of graphics to give the desired look as seen on the screen.
Running Image Studio founder Mark Troy Dsouza said “The Aisha series was very challenging as it was something new for artists in India. Our company loves deadlines and challenges hence working on this series was perfect for us.
The most challenging VFX scenes were the ones where the studio juggled with multiple layers of graphics and moving in different directions at the same time.
“The coordination and planning on off shoot and studio work is the most important part to execute and deliver quality work. We worked on more than 40 minutes of VFX with a team of 12 to 15 artists,” added Mark.
(This article has been written by Rohan Rodrigues)
