It was on a few computer screens in Bengaluru that a blue screen at Hollywood was transformed into a rich canvas of dense forests that hosted the tense drama of Disney’s The Jungle Book .
A significant part of the film, which took home the award for Best Visual Effects during the 89th Academy Awards on Sunday night, was done in Bengaluru, where nearly 300 engineers — out of nearly 800 spread across LA and London — built and provided the finishing touches to a jungle world where Mowgli, his friends and enemies walked and prowled.
“The film was extremely challenging and would be a huge benchmark for visual effects. We had childhood attachments too, for ‘Jungle Book’ is an Indian story. We always hope for the best, but an Oscar is the icing on the cake,” says Amit Sharma, head of compositing at MPC Studio Bengaluru, which was the lead VFX studio for the film.
The mandate given to them was to render a photo-real world, where 224 unique animals would be “captured in their surroundings” as if they were roped in for the film.
Two teams scoured through six forests of south and central India, through three seasons, covering nearly 18,000 km. The result was 20 TB of information and four lakh photographs rendering a landscape, from the rocks to the waterfalls, ferns to pebbles.
“The ‘man-village’ inspiration came from rural Rajasthan, the wolf caves from Badami caves, Banyan trees from Goa, and elephants from those seen at Periyar... these were the references, but everything was created from scratch,” said Mr. Sharma.
From LA to Bengaluru
From Los Angeles, the Oscar statue is expected to come straight to Bengaluru, where the engineers will be given a chance to party with it, said Biren Ghose, executive director of MPC Bengaluru. Engineers in the city had previously played a role in the Oscar-winning Life of Pi in 2012, apart from rendering the graphics for at least six other films nominated for the Academy Awards over the years.
“The complexity, technology and technique used was far beyond Life of Pi because of the scale we were looking at — an entire world that was a crossover of animation and visual effects. All of which was created to an extent that the line between reality and computer-generated characters became blurred... at one point, even Mowgli was computer-generated, and the audience did not know it,” said Mr. Ghose.
