Indian Bureaucracy - Part One - Visa

Heading over here I was of course a little bit concerned about the Famous Indian Bureaucracy. I have always rated bureaucracies with Germany as #2 and The Ohio State University as #1. India… well, it certainly isn't easy, but the fact that people at least speak some English and usually good English keep Germany in #2 for Americans anyway, with India just a little less complex. They are, however quite a bit less organized than Germany. Patience has been the key. I have expected it to be difficult, inscrutable at times and redundant. Probably having these expectations going in has helped me a lot.

In this post I will concentrate on the Visa.  At first the idea was to get a Business Visa. This allows the traveller multiple entries for "business meetings." This will work for most VFX purposes. This is the visa to have if you are working for a US company, (maybe your own) and contracting to an Indian company, or working with an Indian company as a client. This visa requires a pile of documentation proving that a) The Indian Company exists, is incorporated in India and pays taxes. b) The company you work for exists and employs you and will ensure that you have a place to stay, medical coverage and you will pay your taxes, c) There is an agreement between the two companies. Plus of course all the international stuff you need anyway. There's a complete rundown of the website of a company called Travisa which the Indian government has contracted to handle all of the USA related paperwork. You can't get a visa directly from the Indian Consulate. You must go through Travisa. Otherwise I think the consulate would have been inundated by various agencies representing various groups and individuals. It's now one stop shopping for the Consulate.

So we started in on the Business Visa, but it was looking to get rejected according to Travisa (good on the phone, contrary to web reviews) because as I am not incorporated and my "company" was not going to pass muster. They actually said that even if I was incorporated it might not fly because I was signing my own confirmation of employment which would raise red flags. It was critical that all the documents be on good letterhead. They were hip to all the Word Template letterheads and would probably reject them just on that basis. Whoa.

So, we switched to the Employment Visa, which was the correct one for me, as I am actually being hired by an Indian company to work in India. No US company is involved. This visa is allegedly harder to get. They told us that the Business Visa would take "a few days" and the Employment Visa "might take months." (Tourist Visas take 24 hours typically, by the way.) The Employment Visa required all the same documents, minus the US company information, plus the employment agreements between the Indian company and me.  We found that Travisa will not accept any uncompleted package. They won't send papers to the Consulate unless they are pretty much a rubber stamp. This actually works pretty well and the people at Travisa in San Francisco were helpful and accurate with their work. They had lots of good communication with email, website and mobile texts. Going down there in person really expedites things. You need to set appointments on their website. After the paperwork was accepted it was only one day to return the visa, at least in my case. They only give out visas between 530p and 630p so you need to plan for that. We went down to the city and were sitting having coffee across the street when we got the text message that all was ready. The Indian company was allegedly working an expedition from the Indian Embassy in Washington to get the SF Consulate to push this through, but I suspect that that had less to do with the fast turnaround than that we had everything together in a nice package. 

A few more details: You have to surrender your passport to Travisa, so expect that. There are fees. They vary by visa type. Usually around US$150-250. Get lots of passport pictures. Lots. You will need them eventually.

Bottom line is that on the USA side, and largely here in India, if you have your documents carefully handled you are way ahead of the game. Almost all the trouble comes from incomplete or incorrect or unverifiable information. Like all bureaucracies, if you make it easy for them it's easier for you.

Next I'll talk about The Foreign Registration. That's Indian Bureaucracy in India. It's different than hanging out at the Blue Bottle waiting for your iPhone to tell you the news.

So what does Mumbai look like anyway?

Here's a view from my office window. The monsoon season continues unabated. It's ben sunny here and there but mostly cloudy and often rainy for days on end since I got here about 25 days ago. The skyscrapers of South Mumbai (Old Bombay) are hazy silhouettes in the distance.

From the 21st Floor of the Lotus Business Park

South Mumbai is totally different than where our offices are in a suburb called Andheri West. They don't allow the ubiquitous auto-rickshaws and the traffic is less chaotic. There's a kind of expectation that you will stay in a lane and not drive down the middle or all over as is actually de riguer in North Mumbai. So it's quieter and more upscale. The tourists are largely in South Mumbai as all the old British stuff like The Gate of India and the Raja Bai Tower are there. It's the stuff you think of when someone says "Bombay." North Mumbai is what you think of when someone says "Developing Nation." I don't by the way mean that as in "Third World." India is on the move, folks. They are building buildings everywhere. Skyscrapers, malls, highways, hotels, bridges, etc. There is money here and the economy is growing by between 7% and 15% depending on who you talk to.

South Mumbai skyline seen at dusk from the southern tip.

The place is a bit of wreck, though. Slums everywhere. Garbage everywhere. Everything except the poshest of the posh places is dirty, broken-down, mildew-infested or poorly constructed. Sometimes all of the above. Some people are seriously trying to fix some of it but it is definitely a swim upstream. There's just so many people and so much going on that it's impossible for anyone to really get on top of it. That's India. Having said that, I don't see a lot of down-trodden people who have given up. Everyone is alive and moving and getting by. For all the failings of infrastructure, (did I mention that the roads in North Mumbai are more suited to jeeps and tanks than cars and rickshaws?) there is an overall willingness to  complain a little (mostly about corruption in the government and the bureaucracy) and then get on with it. Things do get done. 

Two views from the same hotel shows the posh and the not.

Here's a few more street scenes taken from my car. No, I am not driving in this town. For the first time in my career I am accepting that I should have a driver. My driver is an ace. The proximity alarms are constantly ringing but he never touches anyone on two or four wheels or feet.

Bodyguard made piles of rupees in its opening days.
This is a typical traffic situation.

This is my favorite new sign this week:

The director of the film was actually caught in a scam a few weeks back when he paid a bribe to a detective who said that otherwise he would arrest him for non-payment of fees to some distributor. In the spirit of Anna Hezare's anti-corruption movement he went to the police to complain only to discover that the detective was an imposter who had been bilking thousands from numerous people who believed corruption was inevitable and/or had something to hide. They caught the imposters in their posh villas and I guess, threw them in jail!

Ok, so there's a little featurette on India. More to come…

Three Weeks In. The Work Begins

Happy Birthday to me! My office in Mumbai.

I am three weeks into my Indian Adventure. I have found the people to be incredibly welcoming and excited about the prospects ahead. The director is very interested in building a team of experts than can advise him in making a movie that will outshine all comers in the summer of 2013. We have, along with myself, the production designer from one of the biggest previous VFX films of the last few year (Endhiran), and a well-known action director from Hong Kong. (I'll add "action director" to the list of things to discuss on this blog…)

(I'll note here that I am being intentionally vague about the film and the company I am working with. Sorry about that but there's a level of secrecy about this project that I've been asked to protect in my public blogs, so I will do my best to avoid specifically naming names for now. It's not related to Endhiran.)

The challenges of making a big movie like this is are considerable for a company which has done all of its previous work in India. The big players like Rhythm and Hues, Reliance, PrimeFocus etc. are doing a lot of business as outsourcing from Hollywood, as are Prana and Dreamworks doing in the world of animated movies. There is however also a local VFX industry that is doing work only on Bollywood films. All the cleanup, last minute changes, additional shots, rewrites, etc. that plague us in the VFX business are also part and parcel of Bollywood and this is the meat and potatoes for these companies. They work on a staggering number of films per year, each with a small number of shots varying from A/B comps to put beautiful scenery behind a musical number to complete rebuilds of the photography to change the action that was photographed into something else altogether. Like taking a shoe-leather shot of a guy in a car talking on the phone and turning it into a POV crash scene where a truck rams the car. Involved are all the tools of VFX from painting to comping to 3D reconstructions with full geometry and phototexturing. 

What's not so well developed is photo-realistic 3D rendering and animation techniques for synthetic characters and digital doubles. These are areas where I will be focusing our efforts on the new film. We must improve dramatically to achieve success. If you look at Endhiran (VFX work done by a numver of Indian and Chinese shops, by the way) you will get a good look at where Indian VFX are vis-a-vis Bollywood. Terrific staging, imaginative no-holds-barred concept, with animation that is suitable for robots and rendering that needs just a little more finesse. Sound familiar? It should. It's the same path that the USA VFX teams were on when they were just getting into being a big part of the movies. Times have changed and the tools and talent pools are different, but what Bollywood is asking for now is pushing the limits of their local industry, which is of course, all to the good!

The other piece of the puzzle is also a familiar one: Production Organization. As most of us know from moving from small companies to big companies, there's a big difference in what is required when you get on bigger shows. Just grabbing the best guy and handing him the trouble shot isn't so easy when there are 50 trouble shots. A one-off solution is easy to track when it's a one-off, but when you have 50 things flying against the mainstream of production chaos results and the whole shebang begins to become uncontrollable. This is not obvious to smaller companies and convincing them that that this is not only a good idea, it's the law, is one of the keys to success in my opinion. I have found that where I am there is an understanding of this, which is really good. Other companies with more hubris are quick to want to continue to do things the way they have worked in the past and that often creates drama when in the final crunch the truth is revealed. To that end we are also looking for lots of production talent, people who know how to track lots of shots and predict how to get the show done on time in spite of the inevitable unexpected developments. 

My strategy here is to understand what is going on now and then build from that using existing team members. We will then add people to reinforce the weak spots and thus build our final team. This is opposed to another common idea which is to just come in and lay down the law about "How we do it downtown" without factoring in existing conditions. The assumption that everything here is wrong and the best way to go is to start from scratch is, in my opinion, ignorant of the work that has gone before and disrespectful to the crew and the company. I think that's a poor way to start a relationship with a group you will be depending on for the next 80 weeks.

So, after just three of those weeks, I feel like I am welcome here and I feel that I have a creative voice with the filmmakers and the beginning of a working relationship with the Supes and artists on the floor. It already feels like I want to be moving faster, but things must be considered carefully now, as there won't be time for it once we start shooting and shots start streaming in.

So like everything, this is a start. I will keep this going at least once a week and hopefully more often. You can also read about the non-work aspects of this sojourn at jabertonjrindia.blogspot.com or through links at delusiondog.com if you are of such a mind.

Enjoy!