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May 21, 2008
Hyderabad
Yugandhar Tammareddy, founder and VFX Supervisor of Pixelloid Animation Studio, is excited about their success in the making of a 3D character (of NTR) for the film Kantri, done for the first time in India.
Yugandhar said that Director Meher Ramesh came up with the concept of 3D animated character of NTR in June 2007. "He explained me how he wanted it. This kind of animated character based on an actor was never done in Indian cinema before. While shooting the scenes itself, the director should opt for insertion of the animated character into the frame. If it is not done, it looks awkward. This uncertainty made them drop the idea, initially."
"But I and Meher were very much interested in getting it done. So, we decided to do it quite and show the producer and the hero a demo. The groundwork commenced in December 2007. We went to NTR with sketches of Johnny Bravo and NTR liked it very much.NTR character was close to Toy story character. Then we did some character design illustrations to him. NTR was also excited once we showed him some test shots. And he started co-operating. Aswini Dutt wanted a cowboy hat for the character. But if we keep the hat, the expressions on the face would be shadowed. Hence, we decided to have the character very much similar to NTR himself," Yugandhar said.
"It was a pretty expensive proposition. Swapna Dutt (daughter of Aswini Dutt) came to our studio and watched the demo and she liked it. Then she convinced Aswini Dutt about it. The next day we (I and Meher Ramesh) provided a demo to the producer and he was impressed."
"Then we did a photo shoot with NTR to get 64 expressions so that we could animate all those expressions in 3D format. But he had gained weight a bit when we did photo shoot. The big thing was to take motion capture on NTR. We hired a studio and had 48 IR (Infra Red) cameras fixed in a all directions. NTR has body suit that has IR points. All these 48 cameras capture IR point movements as NTR worked imitating a cartoon. We had all the body movements of NTR from neck down. He could not do with the mask on face as he needs to clean shave it. He still had a couple of weeks of shooting left."
"The first take itself took one and half an hour. And there was no break for the actor. Otherwise, the set up time would have taken one hour each time. Once NTR got to know how to do it, it was a child's play for him. We booked the motion capture studio for 2 days, but NTR finished the entire work in 6 hours."
"It took 10 days time to clean the data. Then we did the facials. And got color correction shots using DI (Digital Intermediate). Then we adjusted the lighting on the animation character to match the lighting of the scene in the frame of the film. Since there is no interaction of 3D character with any of the characters in the film, we did not do any shadow effects. The preproduction of the animation is the most vital aspect. We took 3 months for pre-production of this 3D character."
"We used Maya software for creating 3D character of NTR," Yugandhar said.
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