Photo Finish

The task of making sure the ankle slicers, boggles, cyclops, minoboars and satyrs were more vivid than their PG 13 viewer’s imagination, was entrusted to Los Angeles-based design house Rhythm & Hues and outsourced in parts to their branch in India.

At first glance, the office space in suburban Mumbai transports you to rural Rajasthan. Instead of claustrophobic cubicles, the creative team has constructed small brick huts with thatched roofs and decorated the corners with ethnic handicrafts. The walls of the conference room have been painted by Warli artists, and an antique doorway sourced from a flea market leads to the studio. It’s only the rows of 17” monitors sporting wallpapers from all their other hits—Garfield, Scooby Doo and Daredevil—that put things in perspective. In this softly-lit space, a team of 50 young designers spliced together 200 shots for the $90 million blockbuster.

‘‘We handled several of the big battle scenes and assisted primarily in compositing and camera tracking,’’ says 31-year-old Prashant Babu Buyyala, the company’s import from LA and managing director of the Mumbai set-up. While compositing involves integrating the multiple layers of a shot into an amalgam, camera tracking is a process by which the virtual lens in the computer’s environment replicates the movements of an actual camera—all this on their proprietary softwares, IC, Voodoo and Wren.

For the team in Mumbai, one of the most complex processes was amputating actors at the hip and attaching equestrian midriffs to sculpt the centaurs. ‘‘We replaced the bottom half completely with computer generated bodies,’’ says Rajesh Pai, head of technicals at the studio. ‘‘Once the portion was extricated, artists faced the gargantuan task of painting the grass back into the simulated area to resemble realistic green blades.’’

The climactic battle sequences in Narnia have been described as the most breathtaking in the world of animation, surpassing The Lord of the Rings in sheer variety of characters. And while the fight against Sauron in LOTR was mostly a dimly-lit affair, the sequences in Narnia play out in broad daylight, leaving no room for error. ‘‘Large open fields had to be populated with CG life forms, all performing distinctive acts,’’ says Buyyala.

It’s been two years since the company started work as the lead agency on the project and the most trying part was creating Aslan, the mighty lion god, who was to be a completely animated, yet visually convincing character. Director Andrew Adamson was adamant that Aslan would not just be a computer generated animal, but a 7-ft messiah with a fluttering mane and a face that managed dialogues and emotions with majesty. The company had worked with furry creatures in the past, but Aslan’s mane alone required 15 different hair types with varying degrees of density, colour and transparency.

One of the initial objections that author CS Lewis had to filming the novel was that he didn’t think the animals would be able to carry off the dialogues realistically. But Rhythm and Hues is already in the Oscar club after Babe (1995), a farm soap with a barnyard full of yappers. And their visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer is on the shortlist again this year.

In LA, the process of building Aslan’s face began with bookish references to guarantee anatomical authenticity in his poses. ‘‘The early model of Aslan was made keeping in mind the character of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. We wanted him to to exude the same leadership qualities,’’ says Buyyala. So facial twitches, tilts and neck angles were all borrowed from the Academy Award winning Gregory Peck.

For the Indian division, eating a slice of the $90 million Narnia pie was a giant step towards consolidating their presence in the country. From providing support services, they’re moving towards training artists in modelling and rigging—the skeletal stages of development, where the actual character is given shape.

Future projects in India include the Garfield sequel, Superman Returns and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, for which they’ve designed a car chase in downtown Tokyo from scratch.