Four of the 10 top-grossing movies in 2009 were screened in 3D. Avatar, which collected $1.1 billion within 20 days of its release, may even sink Titanic in terms of revenue.
The audience, though, came up trumps for James Cameron, who had worked to make Avatar for over a decade. The movie has already become the No.2 top-grossing film of all time — the first being Cameron’s own Titanic which grossed around $1.85 billion. In India, too, the film raked in Rs 83 crore in just four weeks, making it the second-biggest Hollywood film ever, after 2012.
Earlier this year, when Fox Star Studios released Ice Age 3 in 3D, it raked in Rs 9 crore in India, making it the highest-grossing Hollywood animated film in the country. Vijay Singh, CEO, Fox Star Studios, says “Since then, we have worked with exhibitors to grow the number of 3D screens from 12 to 50 theatres today. As a result, Avatar was able to draw in wider audiences.”
Aditya Shroff of Fame Cinemas is happy: “Avatar 3D collections in Fame cinemas across India have been 100 per cent even in the second week, and it will continue in the coming weeks as well.” Devang Sampat, senior VP, Cinemax India, concurs: “A single 3D movie recovers all digital and 3D projector expenses. Even with strong Bollywood competition (from films like 3 Idiots), Avatar has been generating near 100 per cent occupancy in its third week.”
A film like Avatar, however, comes at a cost. It’s estimated to have cost almost $500 million (including marketing). The film was released in traditional 2D, 3D, and IMAX 3D formats. Set on planet Pandora, the plot centres around a war between humans and the planet’s native species, the Na’vi. Since humans cannot breathe on Pandora without an oxygen mask, a disabled former Marine (Sam Worthington) is transformed into an “avatar” — a 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned creature genetically engineered to resemble the planet’s humanoid life forms — to befriend the Na’vi and learn their ways in a bid to dominate them.
How they did it
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Traditionally, the digital world would have been added post-production. Cameron’s team, instead, created a “virtual” film camera that was integrated with a monitor to enable them to see the characters as they would appear in the film, react with the digital surroundings and direct them.
Avatar was also filmed with newly-developed stereoscopic cameras — the equivalent of two cameras strapped together, each providing a slightly different perspective on the scene, mimicking the way human eyes view the world in three dimensions.
The 3D of the ’50s required two 35-mm projectors running in perfect synchronisation. But a new technology, developed by the California-based RealD, has made it possible for a single digital projector to handle both left and right eye images with just a push of the button.
The latest wave of 3D filmmaking began with IMAX 3D films such as Across the Sea of Time and Wings of Courage which used complex and expensive technology, based on liquid crystal shutter lenses, to produce strikingly sharp and bright stereoscopic images. James Cameron used the IMAX system to project his 2003 film Ghosts of the Abyss, a 59-minute documentary on the undersea exploration of the Titanic wreck. The technology was also used in several sequences in Avatar.
Hi-tech innovations
Creating a 3D environment is a gigantic task. New Zealand-based WETA Digital — the company behind Gollum and other effects in The Lord Of The Rings — put together more than 800 employees just working on the effects. It had 10,000 quad processing (four processors in one) machines to render the images. That amounts to around 40,000 processors. Filmmakers even make real, tangible models of their characters, known as maquettes, to help them figure out how a 3D character would move in a 3D space.
For Avatar, actors wore customised skull caps fitted with a tiny camera positioned in front of their faces. The cameras captured their expressions and transmitted them to computers. To create the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers visited the Noble Clyde Boudreaux drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico in June 2007 and photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the rig. It was then replicated on screen with computer-generated imagery (CGI).
The digital visual effects in Hollywood require an incredible technology infrastructure that includes both hardware and software. A single frame of a film, once scanned and stored on a disk, consumes around 10 megabytes of disk space. All shots of The Patriot, for example, consumed a total of 1.6 terabyte (a trillion bytes) of disk space. Moreover, individual artists need high-end desktop machines to work on and create their individual models and layers. To render any animated 3D figure or effect like water or smoke, the computer’s processor (CPU) must generate millions of polygons, lines and points, and then light them correctly. And it must do this over and over again for each frame of the shot.
Technological advancements like digital 3D animators make you believe that you’re looking into a 3D space rather than at a 2D screen. Recent sci-fi and animation films — The Matrix, Hell Boy, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter and Shrek — owe much of their box-office success to the mind-boggling CGI and 3D which capture the imagination. But where a film like Terminator 2 used 42 shots with digital characters, Avatar, which has about 12 CGI characters, uses over 1,700 shots with characters which were brought to life on 70 mm.
Can India make an Avatar?
“I see India and Indians making films better and bigger than Avatar in the coming decade,” asserts Bhuvan Lall, president, Lall Entertainment. He adds, though, that “Indian filmdom needs to think in global terms to make films like Avatar — the cost of such products gets monitised by exposure in global windows beyond theatrical release. We lack a global risk taking attitude, and a focus on writing international quality and original screenplays that touch human emotions across the world. We have yet to make a film that has grossed $100 million globally.”
A K Madhavan, CEO of Mumbai-based Crest Animation, has a slightly different take. “Bollywood filmmakers can probably never recreate the visual finery and meticulous graphics we saw in Avatar. We don’t seem to make films for global audiences. “
Pankaj Khandpur, creative director (Visual Computing Labs), Tata Elxsi, explains that to achieve Avatar-like effects, Cameron revamped systems to capture real-time facial motion and muscles, created methods for growing a rain forest in which most of the movie takes place, implemented new lighting techniques, and built a compositing pipeline to handle stereo 3D. “Our filmmakers can never really invest this kind of money and even if a 3D film is made completely out of India, it would still need the actors to spend long periods of time in studio rooms wearing body-suits with just a green screen as the backdrop to capture their motions and facial expressions — a feat that not many leading stars can pull off.”
Avatar success has certainly forced Bollywood filmmakers to rethink future projects. Rakesh Roshan, for example, is reconsidering the hugely ambitious sequel to Krissh that he had been planning. “I saw Avatar in Los Angeles. And it certainly made me sit up. I don’t think it is impossible to create effects on par with Hollywood. We need to budget Krissh 3 intelligently,” says Roshan.
Good hunting ground
For decades, 3D was a gimmick for B grade movies (made worse by flimsy paper glasses), but the latest in CGI technology has largely erased those memories, notes Namit Malhotra, managing director of Prime Focus. He should know, since he has the credit of having worked on about 200 scenes from Avatar. Shares of his company had jumped 10 per cent on the news that it had received $5 million for contributing visual effects to Hollywood’s latest 3D sci-fi extravaganza.
Assuming a project like Avatar had executed all its visual production in India, Prime Focus estimates that the costs would have been halved. “As an industry, we have all the manpower and infrastructure needed to work on a superior CGI product, with motion capture techniques, etc, but what we don’t have is a filmmaker with an expansive vision who can pull off the visual antics. Then, of course, film stars take away a chunk of the movie’s budget,” rues Malhotra.
Special effects projects are about 40 per cent cheaper in India than in the US, largely owing to low-cost labour. And this statistic is good enough for Bollywood, which has already started knocking at the doors of visual effects companies like Tata Elxsi. Says Khandpur of Tata Elxsi: “We have had several serious requests to include Avatar-like 3D and CG sequences in songs or in a few shots within a movie but as the filmmakers realised that this would need a lot of investment, of both time and resources, they backed off.”
VCL is now working on two full-length animation feature films — Arjun the Warrior for UTV Motion Pictures, and another for a European production house. VCL has to its credit last year’s Walt Disney Pictures-Yashraj Films co-production, Roadside Romeo, and has also done digital work for the 2007 Spiderman-3.
Year of 3D
“The stars are aligning to make 2010 the launch year of 3D. But when there is sufficient amount of content available — and lots of people, including Indian production houses are working on this — that will be a true tipping point for consumers,” says Malhotra of Prime Focus. Although Avatar overshadowed Prime Focus’s work on The Twilight Saga: New Moon, where Malhotra’s firm contributed almost 80 per cent of the visual effects for the teen vampire romance, he’s not complaining.
Coming soon
If 3D takes hold, it won’t be Avatar’s doing entirely but the result of a long series of small technological steps and tiny adjustments in audience expectations, says Madhavan. His company, which acquired RichCrest Animation studios in the US nearly a decade back, is expecting a global box office bonanza with Alpha & Omega, its first 3D animated film co-produced with Lionsgate Entertainment. “Our studio facilities in India and the US enable us to produce the highest quality CGI-animated projects at a fraction of the cost of major CGI studios,” he adds.
Touted to be made on a princely budget of $80-$100 million, Alpha & Omega is the story of two bickering wolves — one a disciplined, Alpha-bred wolf and the other a fun-loving, comical Omega wolf — who are captured and taken thousands of miles from their home.
“Spend less on roping overpriced stars and more on film production and detailing. That’s when you achieve quality,” asserts Madhavan. With experience as a full-production animation house, working on a variety of business processing outsourcing jobs, Crest Animation is hoping that its first co-production will help open the floodgates a little bit more. Lionsgate is expected to distribute the movie theatrically on October 1, 2010.
| INDIA’S FIRST 3D MOVIE My Dear Kuttichathan, a Malayalam film, became a rage when it was released in 1984. Produced by Appachan of Navodaya Studio in Kerala, it was so successful that it was dubbed as Chhota Chetan in Hindi and many more regional languages. The film made its way to all corners of India and the studio claims it had to produce one-million polarised glasses for audiences to view the film. The story of My Dear Kuttichathan revolves around a group of kids who kindle the spirit of a chathan (friendly genie). A digitally remastered version with surround sound was released again in 1997 |