Inside India’s largest motion capture facility where SS Rajamouli secretly filmed Mahesh Babu’s Varanasi

In an interview with SCREEN, Shobu Yarlagadda and CV Rao, Chief Technology Officer at Annapurna Studios, shared the story behind the inauguration of the new facility

“It’s the largest of its kind in India,” Shobu said, adding, “And probably in the world itself, it’s one of the biggest.”

But size is not really the point. What they keep coming back to is what the technology allows filmmakers to do that they simply couldn’t before, and how much it costs compared to the alternative.

The 65-day problem

CV Rao used a real, unnamed production to illustrate. A major action sequence had gone to previsualization, the process of planning and visualising a scene before the actual shoot. The production used three high-end cameras, on location, for 25 days. Just for previsualization. “The location cost, the food, the crew, once they shoot, they cannot move from that shot. Once you go, it’s done,” he said.

When the same team eventually went to shoot the sequence itself, the total time spent, previsualization and principal photography combined, came to 65 days.

With motion capture, CV Rao argues, that number decreases. The action and choreography team comes into the studio. Everything is captured as 3D data. The director can then sit with an Unreal Engine technician and change camera angles in real time, see how each shot would look on an actual location, and make every creative decision before a single rupee is spent on a set or a crew call.

“When they go to shoot with this previsualization in hand, more than 50% of the time is reduced. Sometimes even more, because you will get the clarity of what kind of shot you need. You will have everything in order, where you can place an edit, add the song, and see the film,” he said. The cost comparison is stark. For a 10-minute action sequence, CV Rao estimated the motion capture previsualization costs at under 10% of what a conventional location shoot for the same work would run.

The 360 degrees process

The 64-camera setup captures movement from every angle simultaneously. This matters because it removes one of the most frustrating constraints of conventional filmmaking, the locked shot. “Once you do it on the floor, that’s it. You have to reshoot the whole thing,” CV Rao said.

With motion capture, the data exists in 3D space. A director who decides a week later that they want a different angle, a different zoom, a different way into the scene can simply go back into the data and recompose. “You can change the camera angles, you can pan in, zoom out, because it’s 360, you can change. Your entire shot blocking is flexible,” Shobu Yarlagadda explained.

The question of what might have been came up directly during the facility walkthrough. Asked which Indian films from the past decade would have looked different with access to this technology, the answer was broad but pointed. Shobu said any film with significant action, heavy CGI, crowd simulation, or complex choreography, in other words, exactly the kind of films that defined Indian cinema’s recent ambitions, would have been a candidate. The implication was clear. A production like Baahubali, which pushed Indian cinema’s visual scope further than anything before it, was built largely without this resource available domestically. The team did not dwell on the point. But it hung in the room.

Beyond action, the animation argument

The facility is not built only for live-action films. Both Shobu Yarlagadda and CV Rao emphasized that animation constitutes a vital component of their business model, and they believe it represents one of the most underappreciated applications of the technology. Traditional animation is built frame by frame. A character’s movement is constructed manually by animators working from reference. Motion capture replaces much of that process by taking the actual movement data from a performer and transferring it directly to a digital character.

“Instead of keyframe animation, it’s faster and more accurate,” Shobu said. For productions with large-scale crowd sequences, complex choreography, or characters whose movement needs to feel genuinely human, this is not a small distinction.

SS Rajamouli and his team with C V Rao at the facility

The facial capture capability adds another layer. Performers wear head-mounted cameras while moving. The cameras record the minute shifts in expression, the nuances that make a performance feel alive. “The nuances that a classical dancer has, all that is very difficult to convey otherwise. When you give this data to animators, it becomes easier for them to work on,” Shobu said.

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He cited Baahubali: Eternal War as a production that used the facility for exactly this purpose, certain dance sequences and fight sequences were previsualized here, with performers in the studio transmitting their work to choreographers and artists based in France. “They don’t have an understanding of what the director has in mind. So it saves time because it’s composed here and sent to them, they can immediately relate to what the director expects,” he said.

The mobility question

One detail that came up repeatedly was portability. The facility is designed to move. “It’s a mobile system. It’s not fixed,” Shobu Yarlagadda said. If a production needs the facility in Mumbai, Kochi, or anywhere else in the country and has 30 or more shooting days, the team is prepared to relocate the entire setup. “It’s not very complicated from a logistics perspective,” he added.

The technology partner behind the facility’s setup is Brett Ineson, president of Animatrik Film Design, based in Vancouver, with over 30 years in the global film and gaming industry. CV Rao described the collaboration as giving clients access not just to hardware, but to someone who can help them figure out how to break a complex sequence into shootable pieces and execute it properly.

Who is it for?

Shobu Yarlagadda was straightforward about the client split. Big-budget films are the natural fit for the full previsualization workflow, the economics only make sense at scale. Smaller productions or gaming studios tend to come in for specific sequences rather than full productions.

“Gaming studios will only shoot cinematic sequences, action sequences,” he said, adding, “Animation studios also pick a couple of sequences and come for short stunts. But gaming and animation will have limited budgets.”

What he is confident about is the direction of travel. As Indian cinema pushes toward larger canvases, more visual effects, and more complex action, and as the cost of going abroad for this technology continues to be felt, he expects the A&M MoCap Lab to become a default stop rather than a novelty.

“Comparatively, this will be cheaper. But a lot of new clients are requiring a lot of education as well. Quite a few have already done test work on it,” he said.

For SS Rajamouli, the inauguration carried a personal weight. He recalled thinking back to films like Baahubali and Eega, wondering how differently they might have turned out with access to this kind of technology at home. “India has always had some of the world’s best technicians contributing to major global productions, but what we lacked was an advanced facility right here at home. With the introduction of A&M’s Motion Capture technology, that gap has finally been bridged,” he said.