Sridevi’s comeback movie’ English Vinglish’ is the latest feature film to be delivered out of Prime Focus’ one-stop-shop facility in Goregaon, Mumbai.
The R. Balki produced and Gauri Shinde directed film revolves around the story of a woman, Shashi (Sridevi) who does not know how to speak English and is made to feel insecure by her family and society at large. The film is a light- hearted yet touching and transformational journey of Shashi.
The scope of VFX in the movie includes clean-up work, rotoscoping, tracking, PIPs and compositing work. The Prime Focus VFX team was creatively supervised by Senior VFX Supervisor Reupal Rawal.
“VFX was used as an important tool, and although not evident in the movie, it adds a lot of life to the scenes” commented Merzin Tavaria, Co Founder and Chief Creative Director, Prime Focus.
“The movie ‘English Vinglish’ marks our second collaboration with R. Balki after ‘Paa’.
R. Balki has an amazing creative and artistic sensibility and we had to match the VFX to keep up with the aesthetic appeal of the film. It was indeed a pleasure to work with Balki and Gauri.”He concludes.
Informing about the movie Reupal Rawal says,” The most challenging task was the first teaser which shows the Censor Board certificate with Sridevi trying to read the certificate in her broken English. The teaser was Balki’s idea and the team was involved from conceptualization right up to design. This was a major task as it involved a lot of compositing work and rotoscoping Sridevi’s character into every single frame, as well as matching Sridevi’s eye level and hand movements in each frame.”
“Another challenge was to create the opening sequence of the movie. Gauri and Balki had a creative concept in mind, which involved using a lot of fonts. As per the brief provided by them, a detailed concept was designed. The team created an innovative thematic styling, which not only lived up to their expectations, but also grabbed the attention of the viewers.” he adds.
Along with the Hindi version of the movie Prime Focus has also worked on the Tamil and Telugu versions of English Vinglish.
Sharing his experience about the DI of the movie, Rohan Desai, DI Head and Chief Colorist says, “After our collaboration for Blue, it was an absolute pleasure to work with Laxman Utekar, DOP on English Vinglish, once again. He has brilliantly captured every mood and emotion of Shashi and the other characters of the movie. Most of the movie was shot at New York, and for these scenes we set a colorful, glossy, but slightly cold look. After Paa this is our second association with Balki and we’ve explored various grading techniques to achieve the desired look and feel for the film.”
“One of the most challenging areas in the movie was the marriage sequence. Since most of this scene was shot outdoor, the challenge was to maintain consistent color flow all through this sequence. It was difficult to achieve the desired look without DI as it was almost impossible for the crew to be able to shoot in a sunny weather throughout their shooting schedule in NYC.
Prime Focus achieved this by grading each frame and then matching it seamlessly with the previous frame to maintain a consistent look throughout the outdoor shot. Another task was to maintain a steady look for all the classroom sequences.” he concludes.
Sr. Colorist, Aashirwad Hadkar adds more to it saying, “The movie has a number of melodious songs and each one of them has been given a different treatment. For instance, ‘Manhattan’, has a lot of variations with both day and night sequences and is shot at different locations of the city.
We have kept the look and feel fresh and full of life. On the other hand, ‘Dhak Dhuk’ was shot in Pune and carried a warm look.”