Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Magadheera beats Shivaji and became NO.1 SOUTH INDIAN MOVIE
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Magadheera All India Record
ShareMagadheera film made a national flutter by becoming the biggest grosser of the year in India
Magadheera 1 crore in single center list
Share1. RTC X Roads (Hyderabad)
2. Vizag
3. Vijayawada
4. Kakinada
5. Guntur
6. Rajahmundry
7. Ongole
8. Warangal
9. Nellore
10. Ananthapuram
11. Tirupati
12. Kurnool
13. Kadapa
14. Dilshuknagar (Hyderabad)
15. Kukatpally (Hyderabad)
16. Prasadz (Hyderabad)
17. PVR (Bangalore)
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Magadheera collects One crore gross at Cuddapah town
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Magadheera collects One crore gross at Cuddapah town Megapower Star Ram Charan's Sensational box office hit movie Magadheera rewriting the record books with never heard collections. In Cuddapah Magadheera collected a whopping one crore forty thousand gross for 70 days of its run. It also amassed Rs/- 85.5 lakhs share in Cuddapah town, breaking the previous next best by 40 lakhs margin. Earlier Pokiri holds the Cuddapah highest share with 45 lakhs and Arundathi with 43.5 lakh rupees. |
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Magadheera Visual Extravaganza 2
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RC Kamalakannan is the VFX producer of Magadheera. He explains us about the efforts went behind the making of Udayghad city and arena.
What makes Magadheera different from other films?
We know the story in the first 10mins but sat down till the end to watch the credits. That’s the strength of our Director SS.Rajamouli. Next comes Senthil’s camera work. Neat unrelenting professionalism. Next Ravi’s Art department. And then comes my Visual Effects. Many people must’ve congratulated Ravi first for the Stadium set, eventhough its only 15% erected and rest Computer Graphics.
Can you lead us through the stadium & Udaygarh City CG processes:
All should start on paper as concept drawing. But for Stadium, Marco Rolandi, an Italian concept artist, started as a cad-drawing. In 5 days he made his first 3d concept.
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It took five months for Marco to reach the following design as per the Director’s imagination.
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Simultaneously Adel Adili of Iran, 3d Technical Director of Magadheera, was working on the 3d Udaygadh city.
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Adel is a unique 3d artist. He was involved in Anji, Yamadonga, & Arundathi along with me. He started the Udayagiri City with a city-plan. Streets, buildings, mountains, temples, palaces, water bodies and its connections, huge waterfall, its sources, river, its streams, gate, moat, trees, all are perfectly planned, got SSR’s approval in stages, and was executed. All upto scale. Adel redesigned Marco’s 3D stadium to suit Indian Aesthetics and made it fit perfectly to the city. It’s Adel’s stadium that has given the visual grandeur of Magadheera.
The part stadium-set, based on Adel’s design was erected under Art Director Ravi’s supervision at Ramoji Film City. Several technical difficulties were faced during the shoot. For example, the ground was uneven, especially near the King’s seating, steps were 2 ft higher than the ground near the entrance tower. This posed a major problem when we composited real & CG later. The Director came out with a simple solution based on the simple water level, which data we followed carefully till the end of the pipeline in post-production.
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| Erected Set – King’s seating area & waterfall mountain |
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| Erected set – People gallery & Entrance tower |
In India, most 3d computer graphics are happening in 8-bit colour depth, which is much inferior to the colour depth of film negative. That’s why, when we composite live & CG, the CG looks separate from the live “plate”. The only way to do a perfect composite is to follow the same colour-bit depth of the film negative. It needs an experienced, dedicated team to do so. As the VFX producer of the film my job is to find suitable studio/freelancer to deliver utmost quality at proper budget on time. So, we brought in Mr.Pete Draper of UK as our Pipeline Technical Director. Pete had worked with me in Ghajini ( Hindi). His knowledge in Pipeline setup, Renderfarm setup, 3D Particle flows are impeccable. He had also penned many 3D technical books. With the right mix of theoretical & practical knowledge, Pete landed at Hyderabad during the Stadium shooting, which was happening under EFX Prasad’s supervision.
I was in Iran during the schedule, finalising the CG stadium and City with Adel. The major portion of the film was shot in Anamorphic but to minimise the distortion, super 35 camera gate & lenses were used for the stadium episode. The Post-Production of the stadium was given to Prasad EFX, Chennai, a well-known facility. Headed by Mr.Hima Kumar, it has rich experience and had the right people to do the final composite. The producer gave me enough encouragement ( and budget ) to set-up our own Renderfarm in Chennai. The Pipeline, Pete set up, for the post is the “heart” of the process. EFX was lucky to’ve got him as TD. They won’t go back to 8-bit comp ever.
The post process was in several stages, after the scan. 3d-tracking, (or blocking for steady shots), export/import the tracked camera in the 3d-software, setup the light to match the live plate, render the back-ground plates, composite it and deliver. The live stadium had only 7 steps, in which live people were positioned in 6 steps. The remaining 12 steps are CG extension. Adel has done the 3d CG people to fill the CG steps and their actions, in a library of 3000 frames
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| live plate |
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| CG stadium Extension |
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| CG Extension with 3d people |
So a typical composite will have live layer, Stadium layer, 3d people layer, sky layer, flags layer, digital soldiers layer & birds layer. ( All in several 16-bit file passes.) Pete has designed the Birds (particles) in two flows, one “flow” kept on “flying” around the stadium and the other flow takes off from a position dome and lands on a target dome. Director had used the birds in several shots effectively. Also the huge balloons over the live set denote where the CG structure to be positioned later in post and served as a reference for the 3d lighting.
It all went like clock work. On finishing stages of the stadium composite, I ventured to Iran again to work with Adel for the 3d city shots. The city-shots created entirely in CG. The shots where the two horses enter the city gates and the one fly-thru, which travels along the city and ends on top of the Lion’s wings are treat to watch. When we started the city-shot renders, it has taken several hours to render one frame. But Adel re-corrected the geometry and applied several path breaking ideas, so, even on 24th July, just a week before the film release, we were able to do corrections, render and submit. Adel designed the 3d horses with hero & villain and Pete designed the 3d people flocking behind the horses. Perfect team work.
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Thankyou. What’s your future plan?
In 20 years of my profession in CG, there was a time I looked up at VFX Venky’s films, esply he & Director Shankar’s combo, in awe. Starting Indian Artists & working with Directors like Murugadoss & producers like Shyam Prasad Reddy was a step ahead. Later, relinquishing Indian Artists and going freelance made me somewhat lack in confidence. Director SS.Rajamouli gave the confidence back by believing in me and my ideas. I’m forever grateful for it. Future plan, ofcourse, always better than the previous project(s).
- R.C.Kamalakannan
VFX Producer, Magadheera
kamal at vfxkamal dot com
Friday, August 28, 2009
Prasad EFX delivers VFX extravaganza for ‘Magadheera‘
ShareThe matte’s for the entire Bhairava Kona climax sequence involved blue matte shots, set extensions and effects.
The “Bangaru kodipetta” song had “Live to 3D and 3D to Live” shot in it. The hero freezes from live to a stone character and later energies out of that stone structure live. It involved replacing the live hero and background artists with 3D models, 3D tracking modeling and texturing was a challenging job.
The “Bangaru kodipetta” song had “Live to 3D and 3D to Live” shot in it. The hero freezes from live to a stone character and later energies out of that stone structure live. It involved replacing the live hero and background artists with 3D models, 3D tracking modeling and texturing was a challenging job.

Charan at Senthil Kumar Wedding
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Chariot making for Magadheera film
ShareChariots represent the regal stature of the kings in wars and chariot chase sequence is one of the most vital sequences in the movie. One movie that strikes us all about chariot race is Ben Hur. Hence we deliberately decided that chariot design in Magadheera shouldn’t resemble that of Ben Hur movie. South Indian filmmakers have been making films with war backdrop for decades and there is a specialist in making of chariots for movie shootings in Chennai. Our director SS Rajamouli summoned me to go to Chennai and give detailing of our requirements to chariot-maker. We ordered two chariots. When I went back to have a look at the iron skeletons chariots, I was thoroughly disappointed.
I convinced Rajamouli that I will do the chariots myself and came up with three models of chariots. I did iron skeleton first and used fiber material to do the exteriors. There is a scene in the movie where neither hero nor villain was present on the chariot. In order to control the horses, I made a secret chamber for a guy who would be sitting in that chamber in chariot and would be controlling the horses. He is a short guy. I took his measurements and designed a secret chamber (photo here).
Making chariot is very difficult because this chariot would be pulled by four horses. And if the height and weight is not proper, the neck of horses will be severed. I prepared three models of chariots with different heights so that each one could be used as per the camera’s location and to assist other technical requirements.
The chariot race sequence was shot in Dholavira, Gujarath where there is ample sand was available. The quick sand where chariot sinks was taken at a set consisting of three acres in Ramoji Film City.
We had some minor hiccup with the painting on chariot and I have taken a couple painters from Hyderabad to Gujarath on flight with my personal expenses.















































































