Hopefully, by the time you read this, churlish screenshots from Om Raut’s Adipurush — of a grave Prabhas wielding a cartoonish bow, of inexplicable fireworks exploding from the tip of his arrow, of rain and fire defying physics to engulf him in a halo of heroism — have safely subsided from your Twitter timeline. Hopefully, you have had time to rest, rejuvenate, still your breath, and return to the big screen next month for two widely-awaited tentpole releases: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (Margot Robbie! Squeal!) and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (Atom bomb! BOOM!)
There are innumerable cogs continuously rotating behind a film’s production to convincingly manufacture the dream you see projected through a dark theatre. The magic of Barbie, for instance, if done well, will lie in its makeup, costumes and set design — along with a good story and performances, of course. Oppenheimer, like most recent Nolan movies, will thrum along nicely on action choreography, scintillating music and an exposition-heavy story, but it’s the delicately executed visual effects (VFX) that will sell the illusion and allow it to lift off.
“Will he actually blow up an atom bomb to capture the effect realistically?” Jokes like this have been zipping through the internet ever since the first trailer dropped last year, promising another extravagant affair that’s a far cry from Nolan’s humble beginnings with Following, Memento and Insomnia. Even mainstream audiences are well aware of the director’s devotion to believable effects, and the lengths he goes to get them. So why can’t Indian films do the same? Is it money? Talent?
Well, both. And neither. It’s complicated.
First, what are the expenses involved in producing effects for an average Hollywood blockbuster? Many. Generating fancy effects on a computer is expensive. It takes lots of training, experience and software. Doing it the way Nolan does — with actual planes flying into actual hangers, hundreds of extras ramming into each other, rotating hallways suspended from the ceiling — is even more expensive. So why do that? One explanation is that it gives better performances. Countless actors have spoken about the impossibility of taking their performances seriously when they’re standing in a room covered only in green screen — “I was miserable,” Ian McKellen once said, speaking of his time on the set of the Hobbit trilogy. Another explanation is that real props smashing into each other allow real physics: Part of the reason why those bows and arrows look so weird in Adipurush is that an arrow was probably never cocked and shot on set. Nolan built a full-sized model of the Batwing (I refuse to call it the Bat), propped it on a crane, and zoomed it through the streets of Manhattan to record the beast’s momentum, its windows reflecting sunlight, and the shadows it cast on roads and buildings. Later, he made it fly using a computer.
It’s this technical wizardry that has made science-fiction films of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s stand the test of time. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) didn’t exist back then, so fantastical stories were largely the domain of novelists and short story writers. After all, who can dare to adapt the imaginations of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury for the big screen when every other paragraph of their work includes a throwaway reference to a flying ship that’s only peripheral to the plot? But brave attempts were still made. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, adapted from Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, captured the twinkling dystopia of the novel by constructing miniature models of buildings and ships that would be shot very cleverly to look massive and awe-inspiring. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, novelised by Arthur C Clarke, adopted a similar technique. Other cult classics written first and purely for the screen — Star Wars, Alien, Terminator — still look believable because those monsters, aliens and spaceships were all constructed, in miniature form or life-size. Those effects don’t look dated today because they were real back then.
But now, choices abound. Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, released in 1993, terrified audiences worldwide with a T-Rex which looked more real than any lizard in their living rooms. How? Ingenuity. The dinosaur’s head was constructed and controlled using a network of levers and pulleys in a technique called animatronics. Jurassic Park convinced Hollywood studios that effects-heavy movies were the way to go — and they never looked back. Today they are everywhere. “Other than maybe the lowest-budget indie project, there is no film made today that does not feature several hundred visual effects, at absolute minimum,” a VFX artist reportedly told GQ this year. A typical blockbuster film has thousands of effects shots.
It is a very labour-intensive job. Stick around for the credits of any big Hollywood franchise film — Harry Potter, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Mission Impossible, John Wick — and a mass of Indian-sounding names will flood the screen the minute visual effects turn up. Because — surprise, surprise — our labour is cheap. “We used to make only 5-10 per cent of what the artists used to make in the United States and that too with no overtime pay,” said Harsimmar Singh, a VFX artist who has worked on films like Avengers and Thor: Ragnarok, and shows like The Handmaid’s Tale, to PTI in 2019. Bollywood movies like Adipurush and Ram Setu don’t have bad visual effects because we are inherently incapable of good ones — it’s because CGI is a relatively recent phenomenon in our industry, upheld by mostly mediocre scripts, helmed by directors not yet familiar with the technology, and unrealistic deadlines and budgets. “We have had films like Tumbbad and Churuli where artists produced excellent VFX work on tight budgets. It is all about letting a director clearly communicate their vision to the VFX team and giving them the resources to bring it to fruition,” said Raj Bhagat, a Mumbai-based VFX artist, to Established this year. Several international VFX studios have India-based divisions — like Digital Domain, Prana Studios and Moving Picture Company — which have produced effects for multiple MCU films. Many homegrown studios — like Phantom FX and Prime Focus — have worked on films like Avatar and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Moreover, bad CGI is not the exclusive domain of Hindi films. MCU films have come under fire for the same lately. Black Panther, Black Widow, Captain America: Civil War and Ant-Man and the Wasp are egregious examples. Marvel Studios has also been criticised for working its visual effects artists upwards of 60 to 80 hours a week, demanding extravagant changes to scenes at the last minute, and blacklisting companies which resist. “Working on Marvel shows is what pushed me to leave the VFX industry. They’re a horrible client, and I’ve seen way too many colleagues break down after being overworked, while Marvel tightens the purse strings,” tweeted Dhruv Govil, a VFX artist who worked on multiple Marvel projects last year.
So go easy on films — no matter where they are produced — when the effects aren’t up to mark. More often than not, it’s a result of VFX workers being overworked and underpaid. Their plight bears similarity to the writers protesting in Hollywood today. Maybe they can borrow a leaf from their book.
