Looking for the office of Meraki VR Studios led me to a shared workspace in a busy commercial building of Andheri. I was greeted by a small team of five people from the studio’s team.
The name of the studio is the Greek expression for “doing work with passion and soul.” At the first dekko, a team of five stood in sharp contrast to the number of successful projects the studio had added to their kitty. However, a brief chat with one of the studio’s co-founder, Parth Choksi, was helpful for me in understanding the VR ecosystem and their portfolio a bit better.
“Our core expertise is in cinematic VR,” exulted Choksi as he fixed up his Samsung Gear VR HMD to showcase some of the team’s work. An alumnus of IIT Bombay with a mechanical engineering background, Choksi founded the studio in November 2015 alongside Agam Garg and Sairam Sagiraju. Garg is also an IIT Bombay pass-out while Sagiraju, a St. Xavier alumnus in film and TV production takes care of the creating aspects of the company.
“Two years back we were ideating on where can VR be used and the first thing that popped up in our minds was music festivals like Sunburn.” The studio initially created 360 degree experiences for music festivals and later delved into other areas of the industry as well, but it wasn’t a smooth road as you would expect.
Back in 2015, VR industry was at an absolute nascent stage and it was quite a task to approach someone for a VR project. Says Choksi “Initially we had to describe everything from scratch (to a potential client), few people who had heard about VR back then knew something like Oculus exists and that was it.”
Apart from a solid clientele including Facebook, Infosys, Tanishq, Lodha, Mountain Dew and more, the studio also has its standalone projects which they have created on their own. For example, ‘A Mumbai Summer’ is a project documenting the daily life in Mumbai through the lens of VR. The project was not initially planned as a movie, but the makers felt that it had the potential of being one and the result seemed to compliment that.
VR being the latest fad in the country, dominating almost all media and entertainment expos in the country, Choksi still feels that the growth in the sector has stagnated a bit and he hopes it should get up and running soon again.
He says, “There was the initial phase where no one knew what VR was, eventually it drifted to a phase when people wanted to work with VR, but were not sure how to go about it. Now is the phase when a large chunk of the industry knows where the strength of VR is to be applied.”
The team tags themselves as industry agnostic and have worked on a plethora of areas spanning from real-estate to entertainment and even NGO and CSR films. Choksi stated that they do not visit a lot of VR conferences that have been dotting the country recently, if they do, its for the sole purpose of learning and not marketing.
The studio also has a couple of “firsts” to their name including: Hardwell – India’s first 360 degree VR concert after-film, Phobia, Eros International – India’s first 360 degree VR teaser for a Bollywood feature film and arguably the world’s first on-ground VR experience of cricket match (IND v/s PAK) during Asia Cup, Dhaka in 2016, on-ground shots, player interviews, pitch conditions, pavilion shots, dug-outs etc. which was for internal use only.
I tried out one of their horror flicks titled ‘Shower with me’ and I can assure you it will definitely give you the heebie-jeebies. I could easily figure how the piece drew a lot of critical acclaim at the London Indian Film Festival 2017.
