The Special Effect Hotshop

The dinosaurs that pranced about in Jurassic Park drew the worlds attention to the potential of computer effects in movies. Overnight, Silicon Graphics became a household name. Now, a company in Chennai, which has tied up with Silicon Graphics, hopes to top Jurassic Park with its brand of special effects.

Pentafour Software and Exports, a $20 million (Rs 70 crore) company, is no new name to showbiz, having provided the software support for the Tamil hit Avvai Shanmughi (the remake of Mrs Doubtfire, starring Kamalahasan) and the Malayalam film Guru, besides several others. But their biggest ever project is right now being conceived in their sprawling 22 acre software development park at Kelambakam, 30 kms from Chennai, en route to Mahabalipuram. Here, at the spanking new Silicon Studio, set up last year, the special effects for Ashok Amritrajs new film Jeans is taking shape. The mega-budget ambitious movie starring Aishwarya Rai will have the longest computer special effects in film history. If Jurassic Park had just six minutes of special effects, and Independence Day had 12 minutes, then Amritraj & Inc hope to make it a film to be remembered with 45 minutes of spectacular effects all created by Pentafour.

 

So whats it all going to be about? V Chandrashekhar, managing director, Pentafour, is loath to reveal any exciting details. Just watch the film, he says enigmatically. He is more forthcoming about the way computers are increasingly being used as a camera in the movie world to perform actions that a normal camera cannot do. Even in India, computers are now going beyond being a mere mixing medium to a processing medium, he exclaims.

And, he is quick to take a large part of the credit for that. Four years ago when actress Divya Bharati died, Pentafour was the first to offer a solution. Why not use computer graphics to complete the film, was their suggestion. Thus Bharatis pictures were scanned on the computer and morphed on to other images. At that point, morphing was a very new technique and we sent demos throughout the world, says Chandrashekhar. Similarly, when Sunjay Dutt was in jail for three years facing charges under TADA, Bollywood producers approached Pentafour for help. Its perhaps better to play with living faces since one can get a legal right to play around. Otherwise this is one area where one can get into trouble, points out Chandrashekhar, referring no doubt to the illegally-morphed Pooja Bhatt photograph.

Meanwhile, buoyed by the business partnership with Silicon Graphics, Pentafour is pushing hard to grab more film contracts. Multimedia is the low end of creativity, films are the high end, explains Chandrashekhar. Creating banking, insurance, management packages are routine jobs broadcasting is the area where the action and creativity is, he adds.

To realise its ambitions, the company has already set up a huge Silicon studio, housing 120 Silicon Graphics workstations besides hardware such as Avids Illusion and Media Composer, and Discrete Logics Flint. This is only the second Silicon studio in the world after Los Angeles, and the only facility in Asia providing total digital imaging solutions, boasts Chandrashekhar.

The studio is already working on several south Indian films. For the Malayalam film Guru, the studio helped transport characters to exotic locales all created on the computer screen.

The technique used was similar to the one in Hollywood hit Cliffhanger which had Sylvester Stallone doing some death defying stunts on the Alps. Do you think Stallone himself climbed the Alps? No, it was all done in the studio, says Chandrashekhar.

But Chandrashekhar's eyes gleam when he describes the work done on Avvai Shanmughi, undoubtedly Pentafours biggest success so far. We conceived the face of the woman Kamalahasan disguises himself as. We created at least 10 faces before hitting on the perfect face which could be morphed onto the superstars face, he explains. Everything from the make-up to the rose held by Kamalahasan was conceived by the team at Pentafour.

Meanwhile, other projects on hand are a few television serials, notably Bhagvatham (a 50-part serial for Eenadu TV) and Excalibur (a television serial for a foreign network).

In fact, several foreign producers have queued up for Pentafours wares. For Hollywood, as Chandrashekhar explains, getting its special effects at Chennai is a cheaper proposition. Just one minutes effects in the United States will set back a producer by almost Rs one crore, whereas in India, depending on the complexity factor of the demand, it varies from Rs 16 to Rs 45 lakh.

Not surprisingly, Pentafour is eager to cash in on the demand. Already 25 per cent of our business is movies and broadcasting, says Chandrashekhar.

Meanwhile the Silicon Studio has been put to other uses too. Converted into a huge training ground, Pentafour has begun conducting courses for film production executives. It also trains television personnel in animation and multimedia techniques. Undoubtedly, Tamil films are technically one of the most advanced, and producers are only too eager to get their hands on the latest in the market. Besides which Pentafour has tied up with Eastman Kodak for setting up a film scan and film print facility.

But Pentafour is now thinking beyond movies and exploring the satellite world. As Chandrashekhar explains, nowadays most channels are going digital and thus saving space, but the next step is to make the satellite digital, thus allowing it to accommodate more channels. Suppose one satellite can carry 24 channels, compression techniques can now enable it to carry 240 channels. Which is just what the team at Pentafour is working on.

Besides this, the Pentafour programmers are also working round the clock to prepare a dubbing software in the four main Asian languages Chinese, Tamil, English and Hindi. Seventy per cent of Asia can follow the programmes if they are provided in these four languages, says Chandrashekhar.

This is an attempt to devise a programme which would dub according to the sound movement, and thus ensure a natural look. I have already talked to a few channels and they are keen to take this facility, says Chandrashekhar.

Other than that the entertainment wing of the software house is busy producing contents for Web TV, video malls, and on-line entertainment. As Chandrashekhar warns, The PC TV is very soon going to take over.