MUMBAI: With the release of Cash, director Anubhav Sinha has expanded his horizons of styling, good looks, grand costumes, scenic locales, sleek cars. The director has now sprinkled a dose of animation in his film too.
Right from the scripting stage, Sinha was sure that he wanted to include animation. But it was only after the edit of the movie that Graphiti Studio stepped in for the same.
“In the movie, there are very rapid inter-cuts between live and animated characters, so in order to show clean transitions we had to match the colour pallets and grading. To make the live and animated versions look seamless we could commence animation work only after the edit of the film,” says Graphiti CEO and animation director of Cash Tilak Shetty.
The length of the movie was two hours and five minutes when it came to Graphiti, after which 10 minutes of animation comprising 200 shots was added. The work commenced in March and was wrapped up within 60 days.
To sketch the characters, Sinha gave reference photographs of his actors from the film, since the characters were styled differently from their usual look. Graphiti chairman Ram Mohan and his team at Graphiti were the character developers for Cash.< Page Break >
As the film starts and the actors begin to get introduced one by one, their animated versions too make a simultaneous entry. “We followed this pattern so that the audience would be familiar with the animated characters and could comprehend from the flow from the start,” says Shetty.
These animated characters carry peculiar nuances of their live halves. For instance, Riteish Deshmukh’s stubble has been maintained in his animated version too, but with a yellow hue. Similarly Shamita Shetty and Zayed Khan’s respective red and blue hair colours and body type too have been outlined, thus portraying uniqueness of the characters.
“The use background music for animated and live version is same because the inter-cuts are rapid. But for the dubbing of the animated characters we modulated the original voices of the actors only,” says director Anubhav Sinha.
Apart from these characters and scenes concerning them, another interesting use of animation is the 18th century story of the diamond robbery narrated by Zayed Khan to Ayesha Takia. Since the story starts rolling from the 18th century, it is shown in black and white animation and with gradual transition of time the use of colours too changes. As the story draws closer to 20th century the tone changes to sepia and finally when the story reaches current time bright shades are evident.
Sinha and Graphiti chose to keep the animation under wraps, until the release of the movie, but soon promos of the animation will roll out on TV channels.
