About 10 studios and a number of freelance artists from across the world have collaborated with Chennai based visual effects studio Indian Artists Computer Graphics Pvt. Ltd for the Rajinikanth starrer VFX magnum opus ‘Endhiran - The Robot‘ that released on October 1st, 2010 all over India. V. Srinivas M Mohan had donned the dual role of being the VFX Supervisor for the entire film supervising the work of the other studios involved and also as the VFX Head at Indian Artists, being on the main studios that did about 80% of the work.LA based Legacy Effects formerly known as Stan Winston Studio that has earlier worked on movies like ‘Terminator‘ and ‘Jurassic Park‘ has worked on the animatronics for the movie. Hong Kong based studios namely Kinomotive Studios and Menfond Electronics & Arts have attended to the supervision of their respective VFX work. Other Indian studios that were involved in the project were Hyderabad based Firefly Studios; Chennai based VenSat, Pixion, EFX Prasad Studios, Ocher Studios, Mayans Creatives and Oysterr Studios. Also some freelancers from London, Canada, Iran, Germany, France and Hong Kong were part of the project.The movie has about 2000 VFX shots that add up to around 60 scenes in the film. The majority of the VFX work has been handled by Chennai based studio Indian Artists under VFX supervisor V. Srinivas M Mohan and Frankie Chung who has worked on films like ‘Kung Fu Hustle‘ and Eddy Wong were the additional VFX Supervisors from Hong Kong studios Kinomotive studios and Menfond Electronics & Arts respectively.The trilingual movie in Tamil, Hindi and Telugu with English subtitles produced by Kalanidhi Maran and directed by Shankar has Rajinikanth and Aishwarya Rai in the lead roles. It‘s a sci-fi movie in which Rajinikanth plays a dual role of a scientist and a robot. The scientist Dr. Vaseegaran creates a robot with artificial intelligence and names it as Chitti, the film goes on to show how Chitti mingles with society.The animatronics was used in about 22 scenes in total for the movie. All the resources and technology available at Stan Winston Studio were used for the same including puppets and mannequins. About 40 mannequins of The Robot Ranjinikanth were got from Stan Winston Studio for the scenes involving number of robots.
The team has used some unique technology such as the Doom Light stage scanning for detail high resolution CGI face. Also the Indian Artists have developed a new proprietary skin shader plugin with the help of Jupiter Jazz, the developers of shake. The shader is open source and the code for it is available at https://code.google.com/p/jupiterskin/.
Srinivas shared "We have used lots of techniques which we haven‘t used before due to budget constraints such as the pre visualization which were much appreciated and welcomed by studios in the Hollywood when we approached them for their services. The concepts were all wonderful and they had liked the approach towards the film that we had. Thanks to Director Shankar sir for fresh and wild ideas with emotional sc-fi script.Pixion Chennai has worked on the complete title sequence and the scenes where in the Robot Chitti uses his hand as a gun. They also contributed around 300 shots in throughout the film. EFX Prasad has worked on the ‘Arima arima‘ song sequence, while Ocher studios worked on the animation sequence where in the antagonist Dr. Bora explains the capabilities of the robots he is creating to the dealers, Mayans Creatives worked on the baby delivery sequence and Oysterr had worked on a shot.
