Hyderabad based Pixelloid Studios delivered 51 shots for the CG Song in the recently released film, Oosaravelli. Onsite VFX supervision for the sequence was handled by Nayeem Akhtar, Director, Pixelloid Studios and Praveen Ganta. A team of 25 artists working on the song took three weeks to complete the VFX work. There was lot of Matte paint, 3D matchmove and rotoscopy work involved as the team had to change the backgrounds of the set.
Talking to AnimationXpress.com Nayeem Akhtar, Director, Pixelloid Studios shares, “We had to extend the background of the set to make it look like a cliff top surrounded with mountains. The movie had few other studios working on other sequences but we handled only the CG song. There were about 51 shots summing up to the duration of 2 mins.”
The song was shot on a plot of land within the Hyderabad city which is surrounded by buildings in the span of 3 days. Nayeem adds, “The main challenge faced was of matching the look and feel of the visual reference provided by the Director Surender Reddy. Micheal, our VFX Supervisor from LA, played key role in achieving it. The other challenges were during the shoot on the location. We wanted to do multi-layer shots with camera in motion. It’s possible only with a Motion Control Camera Rig, but unfortunately it wasn‘t available on our shooting dates. We went ahead to do those with manual camera motion after a few rehearsals. It wouldn‘t have been possible without the DP Rasool‘s expertise of handling the camera”.
“We used different techniques of 2D tracking the layer and rendering it with 3D tracked camera info in Maya for the multilayer shots. It worked well to give us the Motion control kind of effect. We had to give multi-pass layers for color corrections in DI to get the overcast feel. We had shot the song in bright sunlit day and had to work hard to get the overcast feel. DP Rasool did a brilliant job to get overcast day and day for night feel in the song”, Nayeen further adds.
Currently the studio is working on a movie called, “The Businessman” starring Mahesh Babu, and “Dhamarukam” starring Nagarjuna and there are a couple more in the pipeline. Pixelloid Studios has started a new division in Bangalore which would be in operation from January 2012. They would be having both Training and Production there.