The Big Daddy of all VFX Films ever made in India, the film that has the most staggering number of VFX shots, that thanks to the combination of brilliant VFX work and equally strong marketing campaign brought the entire country’s attention to VFX, the film that has swept and bagged VFX accolades and Awards all over the world, that film ‘Ra.One’ also has just recently won the most prestigious National Award. AnimationXpress.com brings to you conversations with RedChillies. VFX Supremos Keitan Yadav, Haresh Hingorani and the magnificent team that heralded the VFX on Ra.One, and yes it was also the film which had the most amount of inspired Indian VFX artists (and International too) invest their sweat, blood and cheer!
The National Award ceremony conducted on 3rd May 2012 bestowed Ra.One with the most prestigious National Award for VFX. The Shah Rukh Khan film directed by Anubhav Sinha and produced by Gauri Khan was distributed by Eros International Ltd. and Red Chillies Entertainment.
There were a total of 4400 shots in the entire film out of which redchillies.vfx had to work on 3800 VFX shots. But only 3307 VFX shots (9,792,000 frames inclusive of all Layers) made to the final edit (approximately 10 million frames).
In Indian Cinema, Ra.One is one of the most expensive films made with maximum number of VFX shots and the studio was very keen not to compromise on quality. redchilles.vfx worked three shifts – day and night. Around 400 artists from redchillies.vfx worked on this film and overall more than 1000 artists have worked on this film worldwide.
Talking to AnimationXpress.com Ketan Yadav, …………….., Redchillies.vfx shared, “We all feel really great to get a National award from the Government of India. We swept most popular awards for Ra.One, but achieving the National Award for Ra.One has been a great honor and we all will cherish this for the rest of our lives”.
Ra.One has also given the film industry lot of ‘firsts’ in terms of scale, budget, technology. Highlighting the same point Ketan said, “There are a lot of firsts in this film. This was the first film which gathered such a huge international crew and a lot of technicians from all over the world. Coming to VFX, the scale of the VFX in this film is something which has never been attempted. We basically outsourced work to a lot of studios in India and abroad. This is the first time all the studios came together to work in a collaborative environment rather than a competitive one. Outsourcing abroad to places like China, Mexico, Canada, US, Studios in South India is something that has happened for the first time. The kind of VFX, from a technical point of view was another first which we all can see in the movie. Important of all managing and successfully delivering all the shots in time with quality was indeed a great achievement for us all”.
About winning the National Award Haresh Hingorani, Chief Creative Officer, redchillies.vfx shared, “This is definitely the most prestigious award that we have received. We are very happy that we could showcase our skills and be recognized for it. We had around 35 sequences, and out of that 15 sequences were difficult and very time consuming. In the film 70 percent of the work was in 3D which included CGI Cars, CGI Body Double, CGI Trains and a lot more things. That was the part which was very challenging. We bought new machines, new hardware and to support that we had a deal with Nvidia. We were around 1000 artists working in 14 studios, 20 percent of work was outsourced. The most challenging sequence was the train sequence because we shot in Lonavala and had to show that it is happening in Mumbai”.
Few interesting Facts about Ra.One:
• 120 hours per frame render time – 350 frames
• 200,000 frames rendered in 2 days which includes more than 50+ layers / passes
• Rendered more than 300 Nuke Flipbooks a day
• 3307 shots took 83226 man days to complete in Ra.One
• 3800 shots = 4,56,000 frames of scanned data that is approximately 9 TB of storage
Click on the links below to get an insight into details about the magnificent body of VFX Work that Ra.One is.
| SCALE AND MANAGEMENT | VT DESTRUCTION |
| CAR FLIP | TRAIN SEQUENCE |
| INFRA AND TECHNOLOGY | CARMAX |
| G.ONE COSTUME ENHANCEMENT | CLIMAX SEQUNCE |