by Kelly Dove

The Indian film market, popularly known as “Bollywood,” is booming, but Indian filmmaking, until quite recently, has been slow to adapt to computer-generated visual effects (VFX) and animation. As Bollywood moves toward an era of slick visual effects, Indian VFX and animation studios are honing their skills and building their portfolios by taking on work from Hollywood as well as for indigenous films and commercials.

Resident Evil: Extinction, a Sony/Screen Gems film, is the third in a series of films based on the popular Resident Evil games. Not only does the film deliver an outstanding movie going experience, but it elevates the role Indian studios are playing in delivering world-class visual effects. Resident Evil: Extinction is a sci-fi/horror film directed by veteran Russell Mulcahy and stars Milla Jovovich (Zoolander, The Fifth Element). In the movie, Jovovich and her co-stars battle it out with zombies and killer crows against the post-apocalyptic landscape of a ruined Las Vegas.

One studio pushing the boundaries of VFX work on Resident Evil: Extinction is Mumbai-based Anibrain, which was founded in 2006 by Jesh Krishna Murthy, a veteran of the VFX industry who has been in involved with notable movies such as Batman Begins, Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life, and eXistenZ. Mr X Inc., a leading North American VFX studio employed the services of Anibrain for Resident Evil: Extinction and regularly uses them as an outsourcing partner for other projects. Anibrain continues to take on challenging VFX projects.

For Murthy, the key to creating a world-class, high-end animation and VFX studio in India capable of delivering visual effects with worldwide appeal was in integrating top NVIDIA Quadro professional GPUs and NVIDIA Gelato rendering software into Anibrain’s visual computing workflow.

One detailed shot from Resident Evil: Extinction that exemplifies the importance NVIDIA technology plays in the creative process is a “fly-through” of the interior of a satellite. The photorealistic animation was rendered entirely with Gelato film-quality rendering software on Quadro graphics boards.

“We have been very impressed with the real-time rendering capabilities of NVIDIA Quadro FX solutions and NVIDIA SLI™ technology is helping us create mind-blowing visuals in the real-time arena,” says Murthy. “On the high-end, feature-quality rendering side, Gelato is an invaluable tool in our arsenal. Gelato is meeting and surpassing all our rendering needs for photo-real feature film effects.”

To see more projects from Anibrain, visit www.anibrain.com

Credits:

Visual Effects: Mr. X, Toronto

VFX Supervisor:                        Dennis Berardi

Sequence Supervisor                 Aaron Weintraub

Visual Effects: Anibrain. Mumbai

Distributor: Sony/Screen Gems