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!