Actors are as mortal as other humans, but their work gives them a rare chance to attain immortality, on screen. Cinema does a good job of documenting their legacy. Now technology is doing its bit to sustain that legacy. If the recreated animated character of late actor Nagesh opened up possibilities in Kocchadaiyyan , the makers of Kodi Ramakrishna’s Kannada film Nagarahaavu ( Nagabharanam in Telugu) are going a step ahead in recreating late actor Vishnu Vardhan’s persona for a full-fledged character in a live film. Hyderabad-based Makuta VFX, the very team that worked on Baahubali is doing the honours for this impending release. Amidst his schedule for Baahubali 2 , Peter Draper, Division Head and Chief Technical Director at Makuta VFX dissects everything that went into bringing back Vishnu Vardhan onto the celluloid. Excerpts from the interview:
What were the references you had in re-creating Vishnu Vardhan’s body language, for the film? Throw some light on the way you recreated his personality and all other aspects that complete him?
We primarily used his last few features as references. We also relied on dupe artists who make a living impersonating him, who were extensively knowledgeable of the small intricacies of his performances. We also scrutinised other reference material that the actor was in, which gave our animators ideal reference, along with facial motion capturing the dupe artists for final reference and use when working with the 3D model version.
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We actually had four — two dupe artists, one dance master and one fight master — so matching his face to all of their performances was especially tough. It wasn’t a simple case of just remapping the face, we had to do a lot of body adjustments too to ensure that each dupe was matching the other as there were some discernible differences.
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Trying to emulate a face is especially difficult, especially one that is well known and loved. We applied a variety of techniques, depending on the shot’s requirements and the desired performance. From full CG head to footage remapping from previous work and partial mapping using the dupe’s performance along with the re-projected footage and the 3D sculpted head, the work was immense.
Is this the first time of its kind in world cinema to have an actor who’s dead is being recreated totally on-screen?
It’s not the first time - one of the earliest was the late great Oliver Reed for Gladiator , but obviously methods have been enhanced since then.
BeyondVishnuvardhanor the budget, share its similarities and differences in terms of the scale of Baahubali’s VFX?
The stories are totally different as is the VFX, but the same techniques and methodology were used to create the effects work. Baahubali utilised extensive set extension work, while in this feature the primary VFX work was character and FX based due to the nature of the story. The technologies used were the same but their implementation was different.
Does this have to say that legendary actors from other industries can be recreated on screen too? Do you think a lot will depend on the success of this film’s VFX, for this to become a new trend in the future?
There’s no reason why not, it just needs the right story and production company to have the desire to be able to push the envelope with the right VFX studio.
Is budget a significant factor to make the VFX-element as real as possible? Or will the characterisation/role sketch have an equal say too?
Without any doubt. With any art, budget is directly linked to time and quality - a higher budget ensures more time can be worked on shots, resulting in a better quality. If the budget is low, then the quality would be reduced as the amount of time that would be able to be spent on it would be less. It’s what we call “the golden triangle”.