The visual effects industry in India has recorded an unprecedented growth over the years. While mainstream movies have made extensive use of VFX, shortfilms, OTT content and TVC’s seem to be catching up at an unbelievable pace. It is interesting to note that the maximum amount of content that we consume in this day and age is invariably enriched with VFX.
We paid a visit to one of the hottest Indian VFX studios, After Studio and discovered that VFX content is not just limited to silver screen. Today, it has expanded to a wide array of projects across the content spectrum in view of the digital age that has provided a fillip to the demand for picturesque visuals.
After Studio has done tons of projects for both OTT and TVCs. So we were curious to know the difference between work for TVCs, short films and OTT content and the movies?
In conversation with AnimationXpress After Studio technical head Kayash Khan shared, “these are what we call as daily-drivers and are really necessary for us to maintain reality with the current trends in the industry. These projects which generally have shoe-string budgets helps us evolve our workflow on a regular basis. We like to think of them as 20-20 cricket matches without the budgetary benifits. This, in a way prepares us to work better and with more efficiency for bigger projects.”
It is obvious that with the diverse content requirements, there are differences in the workflow. At After studio, they have different team members and strategies for TVCs, OTT content aimed at maintaining different workflow. Khan expressed “Since TVC’s are short-sprinted, the team is usually a bunch of expert generalists who can do a bit of every everything. Although this team is smaller in number, they develop as a team much faster and there is greater transparency which helps them fail fast and mature even faster. On the other side teams for movies are broken-down into departments where there are experts in every department to cater specific requests. Fine details cannot be missed in such projects which is why there is a huge demand to better the workflow for such projects.“
Here is one of the exaple of their TVC projects:
There are various trends in the TVC sector . Khan stressed on the adaptation of an ACES-based workflow for colour grading and VFX which is one such example where it diminishes the gap between the pre-production and post-production process in any and every workflow. According to Khan there are lots of challenges as well that they face when creating VFX content in TVCs for the brands this includes “shoe-string budgets, maddening man-days, rapid technological changes (both hardware and software) and lesser time to re-skill with constant on-going projects, shifting creative goals/ changes, providing tech-support to the artists, being confident that we can deliver a large quantity of work at a high level of quality quickly and lastly clear descriptions of what exactly would be required in the final shot.”
The OTT Gold Rush is real and we were curious to know how after studio is managing the workflow for OTT platform, TVC, movies and others. Expanding on the same tangent, he reveals that the TV side is rapidly changing and there are shorter schedules but still demand for highest quality possible.” This can be a tricky thing to manage especially with the usual challenges that VFX studios already face. Also, since the work is packaged in various studios at once therefore, collaborating work with other vendors has become crucial. He says “we are currently building our pipeline from the group-up so that we can perfect this to a maximum degree.”
After Studio currently has 250 employees working on various projects this includes both movies and OTT content as well. Some of the big contents in which they are currently working on are Street Dancer, Laxmi Bomb, Sorarai Potru (Tamil movie), Vijeta (Marathi movie), Teri meri heri pheriya ( Punjabi movie), Criminal justice season 2 (Hotstar -DI), Hotstages season 2 (Hotstar DI and VFX).
