“In traditional filmmaking, visual effects happen post-production and often in a silo, without any inputs from the cinematographer or director, so creatively there can be misses. Filmmakers took notice, but it was during the pandemic that they began to sit up and take notes. ![]() ” Although virtual production has been on the scene for a few years (‘Avatar’ in 2009), the 2019 film ‘The Mandalorian’ was among the first to replace the green screen with LED. Technology took care of the sunlight including the shadows. “We just set the camera lighting to the noonday sun and shot till late night. Literally, no sweat, says Siva, especially because we didn’t have to be in the hot sun all day. The director brought a bus into the virtual studio, added his background and in a day, was done. We needed to shoot composer Anirudh Ravichander in a moving bus during the day,” says director ‘Tellywise’ Siva, who recently completed the whirlwind shoot. “We had to shoot an advertisement where we had to contend with a two-day deadline. Or to the edge of the seat of a bus racing through the streets of Chennai. It makes changing locations as easy as swapping out a background, which means within seconds, virtual studios can transport actors from a battlefield in 500BC to a winding bylane in Baghdad. And for the audience, it’s infinitely more realistic,” says Venkatakrishan Alwar, founder of DB Productions, who has been into visual effects for several years. It’s a smoother experience for actors and filmmakers. So the actors are immersed in an illusion of the actual setting. But here, you have a pre-created background, which seamlessly zooms in and out and changes angles along with the camera. “With a green screen, for instance, actors cannot see what is going to happen in the scene. It’s about leveraging pre-visalisation, LED video walls and post-visualisation tools to combine physical and virtual elements in real-time. And no, a virtual studio isn’t just about actors shooting in a room with a green screen. In Mumbai, digital services provider K Sera Sera Box Office is reported to have partnered with filmmakers Mahesh Bhatt and Vikram Bhatt to come up with a virtual production studio this year. Actor Nagarjuna Akkineni’s Hyderabad-based Annapurna Studios and Chennai-based Qube Cinema, founded by P Jayendra, have teamed up to open a virtual studio in Telangana by October. ![]() We chose option three and put the two years of the pandemic into research and development of a virtual studio in Chennai,” says Rave Shankarr of IntelliStudios. The shift to remote working meant filmmakers were forced to limit storylines to indoor settings, or come up with ways to get their movies done cost-effectively, realistically and fast. “The pandemic brought ‘on-location’ shooting to a standstill. A couple of weeks ago, DB Productions opened IntelliStudios, a virtual production studio, in Chennai. Today, they work with film directors and cinematographers from across the country on creating backdrops using tech like the unreal engine. ![]() ![]() During the 2020 lockdown, Manoj and National Award-winning VFX supervisor Srinivas Mohan (who worked on ‘Baahubali: The Beginning’) got together to form Stage Unreal with a test lab near Old Mahabalipuram Road. Next month, he will hurtle actor Sivakarthikeyan into the midst of a war in 1940s London. Everything about that scene was a simulation,” says the film’s cinematographer Manoj Paramahamsa, who captured all of it in his virtual production studio Stage Unreal in Chennai. Think actor Vijay, piloting a Sukhoi fighter jet across the sky, firing missiles, a scene from the climax of the film ‘Beast’ that had the audience whistling and hooting. Enter the virtual studio, a concept that is lighting up the world of movie making in more ways than you can imagine. Only this time around it is taking the tech route. CHENNAI: The old cinema studio concept appears to be returning to the scene.
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