Remember the thunderous beauty of N. T. Rama Rao Jr. leaping out of a swerving truck along with hordes of ferocious animals in RRR (2022)? The shimmering lights of the party he is gatecrashing twinkle in the eye of a growling tiger before the animal mauls down mortal throats. That’s all visual effects (VFX). You’ll glimpse some amount of VFX in almost every movie today, but it is perhaps at its most inventive, rich and cinematic in films that peddle pure fantasy. From adding scale to Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s opulent palaces, spinning grotesque magic around horror films like Tumbbad to granting superpowers to mundu-wearing heroes such as in Minnal Murali (2021), VFX has grown to become the very foundation of fantasy films.
“I don’t see VFX artists not being involved from the inception of a fantastical project – unless it is a “fix-it-in-post” kind of a scenario. It would be impossible for a producer or filmmaker to even attempt [a fantasy film with unreal elements] before having VFX teams involved at an early stage,” says Viral Thakkar, the Creative Head at ReDefine, who recently worked as the VFX supervisor for Brahmastra (2022). Instead of a top-down approach where directors instruct the VFX team about the kind of effects they need in a film, sequences of fantasy are often a fruit of collaboration between the filmmaker and the artists – an effort that begins during the stage of scripting itself.
Thakkar, who worked on around 20% of the visual effects for the Rs. 300-crore blockbuster Krrish (2013) was heavily involved in the designing of the film’s technological concepts and the main superhero character. “The antagonist Kaal’s underground lab, his creatures with long tongues and another sequence of these green fumes of virus spreading through a room were all conceptualised during the scripting stage,” said Thakkar, lauding director Rakesh Roshan’s courage to employ such heavy CGI almost a decade ago. Unlike a photo-real film, which has its own challenges in terms of visual effects, fantasy films depend on visual effects to build a convincing world, the very fibre that houses its narrative. When talking about Brahmastra (2022), VFX firm DNEG’s CEO Namit Malhotra mentioned how having no real reference for bringing the film’s vision to life was their biggest challenge.