14.07.2009
Prime Focus delivers a bouquet of visual effects for Bollywood movie Shortkut

Shortkut, Anil Kapoor’s debutant venture as a producer opened to cinema houses on the 10th of July. This Arshad Warsi and Akshaye Khanna starrer has been beautified with some spectacular visual effects delivered by Prime Focus, a leading visual effects services company. A total of 138 VFX shots were used in the film with a medley of Digital Intermediate, Color Grading, 3D Cloth and a few chroma shots.

“The film required a very happy commercial look. We graded the film with noted cinematographer Ashok Mehta. Shortkut is a good example of how DI and VFX work well in conjunction together, especially in the Day for Night portions of Night scape sequence shot in the day. They were graded with two passes for separate elements in the frame and with the beautiful matte paintings and CG elements from VFX the final result is quite beautiful” said Rohan Desai, Business Head- Feature Films, Prime Focus ltd

The song 'Kal Nau Baje', a dream sequence love song picturised on the two lead characters of the film mainly Akshaye Khanna and Amrita Rao  has been completely generated using visual effects by Prime Focus.   For the 'Kal Nau Baje' song there were quite a number of shots that were shot in daylight and were required to be made into night complete with a moon and water reflections. The shots were colour treated and composited in order to get the desired look at the same time keeping the detail of the landscape and characters, which would be near to impossible to achieve if it were actually shot at night. With the help of CG  Prime Focus managed to create the moon along with its reflection in the water to give it a very realistic feel.



Commenting on the song and the project in general, Merzin Tavaria, Creative Head - Vfx and Animation, Prime Focus and Vfx Supervisor on Shortcut said, “The song Kal Nau Baje is one of the most beautifully picturised and delivered romantic songs of recent times. After our recent slew of films such as Kal Kissne Dekha, Chandni Chowk to China and Kambhakt Ishq, Shortkut is yet another successful project delivered by our team at Prime Focus.”

Digital Matte painting – This technique was used to create the night city scape view from the top of a highrise. The shots were taken in the day time and were required to be given a night feel complete with lit up buildings, streets, cars, etc. All the elements like buildings, street lights, traffic and ambient lighting were achieved with a lot of effort by piecing them together and tracking them into the live shot using a camera tracking software and then composited using camera projection and tracking. The same technique was used to create a night city scape along with a full moon for a few shots that were shot on green screen (Chroma) with the characters against a window.





3D cloth simulation– Quite a few number of shots had the female character standing on the edge of a jetty wearing a red dress with long pieces of extended red cloth that flowed in the wind. The requirement was for us to add more cloth to the existing red cloth for which 3D cloth simulation was used. CG generated cloth was created and simulated to match the movement of the real cloth the character was wearing. The challenge for us was to exactly match the real cloth in terms of flow, texture, lighting complete with folds. Not forgetting that most of the shots had camera movement so once again with the help of a 3D camera track we managed to track in the CG cloth into the live shots seamlessly and also created wind interaction for the 3D cloth to behave like the real cloth. 

Susheel Peris, VFX Supervisor on Shortkut commented, “Shortkut presented the Prime Focus team with yet another interesting opportunity to deliver spectacular visual effects. We hope that the movie is an astounding success and its effects are acclaimed by the viewers and the film fraternity.

Rate this News -