Rahul Venugopal was watching reruns of Interstellar in March 2014, when the world hadn’t even seen the trailer yet. But he couldn’t boast about it. “Until a film’s trailer is released, we are prohibited from revealing anything about projects we are working on,” he says.
Rahul was part of the 500-member crew at Double Negative Visual Effects, London, which worked on Interstellar and won this year’s Oscar for Best Visual Effects. In a poetic coincidence, this was the first year that Rahul, who shuttles between countries to work with international VFX studios, caught the Academy Awards function live. Interestingly, he didn’t even think Interstellar would win. “I expected Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to win, as its effects were more overt. When it was announced that our team won, I felt thrilled. My family and friends called to congratulate me. There were also plenty of congratulatory messages on Facebook,” he says. It’s a huge step forward for his VFX career. Rahul was digital compositor for Interstellar , which is techspeak for an artiste who fuses graphically designed backgrounds to scenes that are usually shot against a blue/green screen. But here’s the tricky bit. Christopher Nolan, the director of Interstellar , didn’t use the blue screen when shooting the original scenes. “He felt it would disrupt the mood, and affect an actor’s immersion.” So, Rahul had to do plenty of what he calls ‘cleaning work’. “Reflections on the shiny space suits and helmets, for example. It was slow, laborious work, vindicated by the Oscar.” The whole process was also made more complicated by the IMAX format the film was shot in. “The usual theatre resolution is 2K, but it is 16K in IMAX. So you can imagine the complexity of detail.”
This 28-year-old, originally from Kochi and a student of Chennai, didn’t get a chance to interact with Nolan though. “My supervisor, Paul J. Franklin (who has previously won an Oscar for Inception ) acted as intermediary. We worked between March and June with daily reviews of our progress,” says Rahul, who did a Diploma in Media Technology from Chennai’s School of Audio Engineering in 2006, before doing his Bachelor’s at SAE Singapore. He shortly returned to India and, as part of the Makuta VFX team in Hyderabad, worked as a set supervisor and matte painter for Naan Ee , which went on to win the National Award for Best VFX. One thing led to another, and he soon found himself working on films such as 7aum Arivu, The Expendables 2 and Olympus Has Fallen .
Sadly, though, he confesses that the sort of work outsourced to techies here is of the labourer mould. “Work like rotoscoping is outsourced here. It is what the big studios call ‘sweat jobs’.” Rahul attributes this to the overall lack of financing and experience.
For now, Rahul is awaiting the release of Interstellar ’s DVD. Only then can he legally add Interstellar to his portfolio. And, of course, use those magic words ‘Oscar Award’ on his website.
