“Meet the special team,” says Deepak Bohra, co-founder of visual effects and post-production company BotVFX, pointing to a group of people in one corner of a dark room.
Peering into a computer screen and dexterously moving a mouse, each of them are fixing the edges of a human figure. They are clearly going about their work with quiet efficiency. This special team consists of 22 members, and all of them are hearing-and-speech-impaired.
“This is not a batch of people with disabilities. Artistically and professionally, they are no different from the other members of the company. They share the same benefits and privileges entitled to every employee here,” points out Deepak.
Chennai: Tamil nadu: 13/02/2018: Deepak Bohra and Sreyans Bardia founders of Bot VFX studio, Lebara Towers, Teynampet. Photo: M.Sailakshmi
Formed in 2016, this team constitutes close to 10% of the workforce. Among the 22 members, 18 are full-time employees and four are undergoing internship.
Every six months, three to four candidates are recruited into this team.
They primarily focus on rotoscopy, an animation technique that involves extracting a character out of a scene. Some of the Hollywood projects the team has worked on include Beauty and The Beast , The Fast and The Furious , Power Rangers , Transformers 5 , Doctor Strange , Netflix series Stranger Things.
The genesis
The Teynampet-based company identifies candidates with disabilities from colleges, trains and inducts them as interns and then recruits them based on merit.
The team started with two members. “Later, we decided to try a batch of similar candidates, train them and see if they can deliver similar output,” says Deepak. “However, training them was not an easy task.”
Twelve candidates were first identified and given training for three months. It somehow failed to generate the desired output as the candidates took longer periods to grasp the concept of visual effects and did not make the cut in the eligibility test.
Deepak and co-founder Sreyans S. Bardia, however, persisted.
“It later dawned on us that we had to bring in someone who could communicate with these candidates in sign language and not just have a regular trainer write the instructions on a board. We turned to one of our in-house resource, Nithya, who would later change the dynamics of the work. Explaining the module would take months, but she accomplished it in two months,” he says.
Chennai: Tamil Nadu: 13/02/2018: The Bot VFX studio special team, hearing and speech impaired employees working at their workstation. Photo: M.Sailakshmi
BOT VFX employs an instructor trained in sign language to teach sign language to the other employees, to ensure that these 22 don’t feel isolated.
Of signs and texts
According to Prem, the head of the department — Rotoscope for BOT VFX, communicating the feedback from the client is at times, a tad too challenging.
“They can read the written instructions. However, minute technical details have to be communicated through texts and sign language,” he says.
Creating awareness
Deepak notes that there is a major lack of awareness about career options for those with disabilities in the visual effects space.
Drawing upon his experience, he says, “A few months ago, we took our employees to Munnar. At the railway station, an elderly man saw the members of the Special Team communicating in sign language. He immediately enquired with us; and we learnt that his son, who has a form of disability, had graduated from college, and was at home, with no luck of finding a job. Inspired by the Special Team, the man is training his son to take up a career in this field.”
He adds, “In fact, many in the visual effects industry, including our clients, are unaware of the potential of a person with a disability.”
In order to increase awareness, Deepak and Sreyans offer scholarships to eligible candidates and organise workshops and training sessions in colleges.
“In the future, we are planning to reshuffle the team and help them integrate into other departments and take up different fields of work.”
