One of the biggest players on the Indian animation horizon, Hyderabad based DQ Entertainment has stepped up its thrust on Visual Effects.
Of its 2500+ strong workforce, close to 1400 are part of its 3D animation and gaming division. Of these 200 artists have VFX skill sets and are currently working on four Visual Effects projects at DQ.
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com, Vishal Dudeja, V.P. Operations, DQ stated, ” VFX expertise has always been part of our production pipeline. However, as the demand for high quality visual effects increases, we are working on a parallel increase of skill sets available within the company. There will be a concerted effort though additional recruitment as well as training.”
In the past four years, the studio has worked on 17 VFX projects including Skyland, Donkey Ollie etc. Talking about Skyland, Dudeja commented, “Skyland was an incredible project for us to work on. It is highly cinematic and technically very complex project as far as Visual effects is concerned. The story line demands high feature quality Visual effects like blasts, super powers, atmospheric effects etc. It demands huge amount of simulations, high quality lighting and huge rendering time, and each and every shot was split into multiple number of layers and the final rendered layers were composited to achieve the final output. We have developed proprietary scripts and plugins to achieve the desired quality
So far we have created VFX for 3D & 2D Gaming content, however we have strong Visual effects expertise capable of handling live-action with CG, and capable of providing Visual effects for live-action feature films. Our VFX artists have specialized skills in areas starting from technical supervision of live shoots till the final delivery of the footage” he added.
The nature of VFX work that the studio has been involved in includes Fluid simulations, Explosions and blasts, Crowd simulation, Cloth, Hair and Fur simulation, Match moving, Blue / Green screen shoots, Atmospheric effects, Wire removals, Miniature shoots and Composing CG effects on live shoots.
On being asked about where the VFX talent was being sourced to meet its VFX expansion needs, a company source from DQ shared that since skilled manpower is not readily available in India, DQ has its own training division “Center for Learning Animation, Visual Effects & Games” to supplement its manpower needs.