After a 4 year long association at Apple, Raja Koduri has recently moved on to join forces at Hyderabad based visual effects facility as the Chief Technical Advisor to Makuta’s board of directors.
Joined in April 2009, Raja Kudori served as Director of Graphics Architecture at Apple Inc with the intent to help the company’s bid to design its own computer chips at the time.
An alumni of Oasis, Raja is involved with computer graphics hardware industry for the past 17 years and made hands on contributions to building many generations of GPUs and technologies such as Retina displays. He recently worked as Director of Graphics Architecture at Apple and prior to that he was CTO of Graphics Division at AMD/ATI. Raja followed the visual effects technology and industry progression with great interest and fascination since his days at IIT, Kharagpur.
Talking to AnimationXpress.com’s Ishpreet Chandock, Raja Koduri, says,” I look forward to helping Makuta realize its vision of enabling story tellers in India and the rest of the world brings to life their imagination within practical budgets, through creative use of technology”
“Raja is amongst the top architects in real-time computer graphics world today and we are very excited to have him advise our board. We anticipate that he will bring exciting technological advances for Makuta and help move the state of art in Indian VFX industry forward” says Dasaradha Gude, Chairman Board of Directors, Makuta Inc
In further updates, bestowed by the National Film Award for Best Visual Effects for the Telugu film Eega (The Fly), the Hyderabad-based Makuta VFX is also planning to double the number of employees to 120 this year from the present 60.
A fully-fledged facility providing special effects to the film industry, the visual effects studio is also planning to create intellectual property rights by building IT tools.
“We are planning to come out with basic building blocks. Using these blocks, life would be easier for those who come to us for special effects works,” says Dasaradh Gude, Chairman of Makuta Inc.
Makuta Effects offers movie projects – from high-end particle and dynamics work to character animation, photorealistic lighting and rendering and intuitive compositing
“We are also working on an information technology solution that would help both the film director and the VFX firms to keep an eye on the work flow. It will help them in keeping a strict control on the work plan,” says Raja Koduri, who has just been appointed as Chief Technical Advisor to Makuta’s board of directors.
“We grew from a handful of people to 25 and to the present 60 in three years. We are planning to expand to outside of Hyderabad. The promoters, who had invested “a couple of crores” in the company, had no plans to invite private equity funds at this stage. But we might consider such funding if it comes through strategic alliances,” Dasaradh adds.
In the special effects industry, Dasaradh said the biggest challenge was the regular pipeline of projects. “The gap between one project to another is a challenge. Several companies are not able to face this challenge,” he says.