Apart from the south Indian film industry, the other regional cinemas do not work on great budgets like Bollywood and Hollywood does and it is incredibly rare to see visual effects being used in it. However, Marathi cinema seems to be toeing the line of adding more VFX to its movies.
Marathi film star Swapnil Joshi’s latest release Mitwaa was one such which saw several scenes that needed VFX to be added. The movie that released last month saw Vertex Volt add glamour to the movie directed by Swapna Waghmare-Joshi and Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy have given the music.
A total of 30 artists were involved in the movie from Vertex Volt that included 3D character designing and animation, matte paintings, particle effects, rotoscopy and compositing. There were close to 325 VFX shots for Mitwaa. Some of them included transitions between shots through rotoscopy and compositing, text formation in the sky through smoke emitted from a 3D jet plane, 3D birds close up shots etc.
For one particular beach sequence, the requirement was to create a 3D model of a crow and animate and composite it in such a way that it looks realistic during a close up shot. Some car travelling sequences were shot on chroma. The entire VFX execution took a little more than a month from 20 December 2014 to 25 January 2015. “Our skilful artists were very clear regarding the brief of every shot so they did not require to invest much time for any kind of research,” says Vertex Volt founder and VFX supervisor Hardik Gajjar.
The experience of working for Mitwaa was also new for Hardik. “It was a great experience to work for Mitwaa as this is our first VFX project for a Marathi movie. We have worked for a Gujarati movie two years ago and also a few short regional films. This is also our first time working with the director and it was a good experience. Though she is new to VFX, she had a vision set in her mind about the look she wanted for the VFX shots. So there was no scope of confusion at either end and the work came out exactly as per her requirement,” he says.
The regional cinema is slowly adapting to using cost effective measures such as VFX. “A silent revolution has been sweeping across the Indian animation industry over the past decade. We are seeing growth of VFX industry, as many regional films are using VFX as a major part of their story telling process, so there is a huge scope for VFX in movies these days,” says Hardik.