The Hindu Business Line : Indian touch to US box office-hit

Rhythm and Hues India worked on the project from the beginning. It worked on various research and development tasks, and artists from various teams were brought in as the production tasks started ramping up.

Chennai , Feb. 10

THE latest American box office hit, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, is a film made in the US, and based on a novel set in England, written by an Oxford professor.

But as Western as its origins may seem, Indian touches did contribute to bringing this phantasmal world to life in the visual form.

Rhythm & Hues, the animation and design studio in Los Angeles, was the lead house in creating all the visual effects and animation for the film, and its Mumbai subsidiary worked simultaneously on compositing, among other things, for the film.

What exactly is compositing? "It is the process of digitally mixing the computer generated imagery (CGI) with the live action footage, as also the stage in post-production in which all the unwanted props and crew are removed," said Mr Sesha Prasad, Digital Production Manager, Rhythm & Hues India

While working on the movie, R&H India was simultaneously working on The Longest Yard (2005), a Hollywood production starring Adam Sandler. The climax of the film is held in a football stadium, with 50,000 people watching a team of convicts take on prison wardens in a dramatic, bone-crunching sequence of events.

"You can't get 50,000 people in a stadium, obviously," said Mr Prasad. So that's where R&H India came in, shooting crowds separately, tinkering with the colours to make it look authentic, and tracking the crowds in on the camera pans that swept across the stadium every now and then during the sequence of scenes. "We worked on over a hundred shots in the film," he said.

Similarly, the company also worked on 40 shots in Hollywood production Serenity (2005) and on small flash sequences, and a little bit of compositing in Interpreter (2005).

In The Chronicles of Narnia, computer-generated imagery (CGI) was used in the film to add to the visual spectacle of Aslan, the lion, who forms the centrepiece of the story. Consequently, the process of compositing became an important function.

Also, the world of Narnia is full of centaurs (creatures with a human head and torso and a horse's lower body) that were shot with riders atop horses. Which left R&H India with the job of removing the riders and the horse heads so that computer generated human upper halves could be integrated.

Another process R&H had to deal with was camera tracking — a technique required for seamless integration of CGI with live action — making the camera movements in the software generated portions of the movie similar to the movements in the live action. And finally, there was matchmoving, a technique of digitally extracting the movement of actors with whom the CGI object needs to interact.

"We worked on the project from the beginning (18 months ago)," said Mr Prasad. The company worked on various research and development tasks, and artists from various teams were brought in as the production tasks started ramping up.

At the busiest stage, the company had over 50 artists, pipeline support, technical support and production support working on the project, along with supervisors and support personnel from the Los Angeles office.

"Since we were working on other projects at the same time, it was quite exciting to juggle the various projects," he said.

Its upcoming projects include Superman Returns, Garfield 2, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Charlotte's Web. What kind of work will the Mumbai subsidiary be doing on these? "It will be difficult to say what specific areas, since the resources are split based depending on availability. We are the same company in LA and in India, after all," he said.

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