In a scene from his coming film Michael, the character played by Naseeruddin Shah is hit by a tram while walking on a road in Kolkata. His body is flung into the air, before landing on the roadside. The scene is amazingly life-like.
What breathes life into the scene is a mannequin built by a team of silicone mannequin makers from Ahmedabad. Dirty Hands, the mannequin company, comprises a group of young artists from the National Institute of Design (NID), who have ventured into the niche segment of making what they call “hyper-realistic mannequins”.
Where does their business opportunity lie? Indian films have, through the years, expanded their horizons. Now, these are adopting special effects to make scenes look more realistic. Initially, these collaborated with foreign special effects teams in the areas of make-up, costumes, computer graphics, etc. However, with companies such as Dirty Hands coming up, filmmakers now have domestic options to choose from. This results in significant savings for production houses.
As Guneet Monga, producer of Gangs of Wasseypur and chief executive of Anurag Kashyap Films Pvt Ltd and Sikhya Entertainment, says, “I am mighty impressed and in awe of their work. In terms of prosthetics, they are on par, if not better than those internationally. We just provided them with a brief of what was needed and soon, they were back. They blew us away with what they had come up with.”
How it started
Two friends at NID, keen to experiment with sculpting materials, delved into something that didn’t have many precedents. With experience in art, architecture, ceramic and glass design, Mamta Gautam and Rajiv Subba started design firm Dirty Hands in 2008. Soon, they were joined by another NIDian, Zuby Johal, now the company’s managing director. While the core team comprises five friends, the overall team is 20-people strong. Johal says it started with an initial investment of Rs 20,000; Dirty Hands is hopeful of ending this financial year with a turnover of Rs 1.2 crore.
In the initial years, Johal says, the journey was both tough and magical. “We did not know many clients. Godrej Interio and Mocha chain of cafes approached us for some designs in furniture and ceramic ware. Samples and prototypes were made. However, nothing concrete happened.” At a time when the team was working on installation work at Ahmedabad-based clubs, Design Habit, a Delhi-based design firm presented an opportunity to make mannequins for the Sadhu Vaswani Museum in Pune. “At that time, mannequins were being made from latex,” Johal says. “We brainstormed and came up with the idea of using silicone as a material for our mannequins. Design Habit gave us a free hand. We finally made 18 mannequins for the museum.”
The next two years were spent in perfecting the art of making mannequins from the new material. “We were importing the material and the colours from the US. It took time to perfect the technicalities, to bring out the Indian skin tone and recreate the character impressively,” Johal says.
The end product was extremely close to reality. One morning, when a maid came to clean the studio at the NID campus, she saw a man sitting on the floor, listening to music. By the time she had finished her chore, the man hadn’t moved a muscle. Curious, the woman tried to check whether he was breathing. To her horror, he wasn’t; she ran to the security guard, asking him to call for an ambulance.
Little did she know what she had taken to be a human was in fact a mannequin.
In 2010, Anurag Kashyap approached the team and showed it the script of Gangs of Wasseypur. He wanted the team to suggest areas in which prosthetics could be incorporated into the film — make-up, wounds and cut limbs, etc. Since then, Dirty Hands has worked with Kashyap in many films (some are yet to be released) such as Ugly and Michael.
Challenges
As a raw material, silicone presented a major challenge. Compared to latex or fibre, it was expensive and had to be imported, says Johal. “We import it in liquid form; it turns solid only after casting. And, the price varies from one grade to another,” he says. It costs about Rs 2.95-5.15 lakh a tonne; the price of latex stands at about Rs 1.38 lakh a tonne.
As none was making mannequins from this material, the team had to research on the internet and adopt a trial-and-error method to perfect the art. Second, while the material offered them more creative leeway to experiment with shapes and textures, the cost of mannequins rose, making it difficult to convince clients to opt for silicone. A mannequin with less exposed body area (which is made of silicone) costs about Rs 8 lakh, while a hand-modelled (not cast in moulds) mannequin with more exposed area costs about Rs 16 lakh.
Another challenge is that of scalability. Kandaswamy Bharathan, course coordinator, Contemporary Film Industry, Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, says, “While the market for such products is high, scalability is an issue. This is skilled manual work, not machine-made.” He says to add a new dimension to the medium, the Indian film industry is increasingly becoming receptive to advanced technology and materials and, therefore, is quality-conscious. “The so-called cost advantage vis-a-vis foreign imports is unlikely to work if the quality parameter is not catered to,” says Bharathan.
Way ahead
Dirty Hands has also started receiving offers from the film industry in the South. Its museum orders, too, have swelled. The team, however, has decided to shift its focus to another segment in which prosthetics is in high demand — the medical sector. According to market estimates, the medical prosthetics segment is expected to touch $23.5 billion globally by 2015.
The core team of Dirty Hands is now keen on entering the medical prosthetics space, and its unique selling-point, it feels, is its ‘hyper-realistic’ products. While prosthetic limbs like the famous Jaipur foot are already available in the market, these are low on comfort and aesthetics. Limbs and other body parts made by Dirty Hands bear greater resemblance to natural ones, it claims.
For the medical prosthetics business, Dirty Hands formed a new company, Sarathi Life Aids, and decided to incubate this at NID. The company has received funding from NDBI Venture Ready Fund (NVRF) floated by NID’s National Design Business Incubator. According to norms, once a start-up is incubated at NID (it is given three years for this), it cannot apply for venture funding. Therefore, to apply for funds, the team had to float a separate company which would be taken into National Design Business Incubator’s fold.
“We have received funding of about Rs 5 lakh from NVRF. But we are yet to begin work on the medical prosthetics business as currently, we are occupied with the work at hand. It would take another year before we can firm up anything,” says Johal. The Dirty Hands team plans to work in the bio-mechatronics area and has tied up with Ahmedabad-based robotics firm Gridbots Technologies for robotics solutions.
Bio-mechatronics is the science of using mechanical devices with human muscle, skeleton and nervous system to assist or enhance motor control. Johal says the prosthetic limbs they plan to produce would be able to ape normal body movements.
When asked how the team plans to scale up and tap a wider market, Johal said, “We need to add more people to the team. We are also scouting for students from design institutes and art and architecture colleges who can be trained... However, we do not wish to enhance the core team; it would always be a team of four to five people. Also, as our work cannot be produced by machines, the human touch is crucial. Therefore, operations cannot be scaled up for assembly line production.” She added as of now, the current team was sufficient to cater to the demand.
While the company’s turnover in 2011-12 was about Rs 40 lakh, with a profit of about Rs 1.36 lakh, it plans to treble the turnover by 2012-13 to about Rs 1.2 crore. With the medical prosthetics wing taking off, by 2014-15 the turnover would grow significantly (Johal doesn’t give an estimate of the figure). She says initially, the company plans to make medical kits and limbs based on robotics solutions from its partner Gridbots. The team says it plans to start slow, with a few niche projects, before taking the plunge.
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EXPERT TAKE The way ahead for Dirty Hands is definitely in the area of medical prosthetics. There, it would have an advantage over its US and European counterparts, where manpower is very expensive. Also, I feel there is an abundant market for medical kits, which is an easier market to tap. However, its products are not mass-manufactured. Each limb has to be customised according to an individual’s specifications. Therefore, it would require a certain amount of finesse and craftsmanship. Before people can take on something like this, they have to be trained well. Therefore, there is an issue of scalability. Finding the right kind of manpower will be a challenge for the company. Also, in the future, the team has to expand to cater to the growing demand. This is not possible without partnerships and collaborations. The problem, according to me, is today, not many innovators are open to share know-how with others, fearing infringement of intellectual property. But in the Indian system, if any product is doing well, it is almost certain its clones would appear in the market. Dirty Hands would also have to think about scalability and collaborations as its way ahead. Activities like finance and marketing should be outsourced. |
Mahesh Krovvidi, CEO, NDBI, and member, India Design Council
