Leading Indian post company finishes high-profile work for film and television
FutureWorks Media, the leading Indian post production company, has installed two Baselight grading suites in its finishing facility in Mumbai. The company, which has three locations in the country’s movie capital as well as a fourth in Chennai, is a leading provider of visual effects for movies and television as well as a popular finishing house.
The two Baselight suites sit on the facility’s high-speed network, allowing them to share projects for maximum efficiency and productivity. It also allows VFX shots to be dropped onto the timeline as they are completed, with conforming and matching carried out in Baselight to provide a one-stop finishing process.
This workflow has already been used on a number of the most successful recent Indian movies, including Sultan (directed by Ali Abbas Zafar), Banjo (Ravi Jadhav) and Sanam Re (Divya Khosla), all finished by senior colourist Rahul Purav.
Senior Colourist Rahul Purav
“All three movies were dependent upon strong, characteristic looks,” Purav said. “In Sultan we follow the hero from a dusty rural Indian village in Haryana to the bright lights of Delhi. The film Banjo is a musical drama based on a particular style of music in Mumbai with an instrument called Banjo during Mumbai’s Ganesh festivals. The director wanted to capture the life, colours and textures of the unexplored locations in Mumbai where this music is practiced, along with the ambience.
“Divya Khosla and DoP Sameer Arya captured picture postcard shots for Sanam Re, in locations from Ladakh in India to Alberta in Canada,” he added. “In Baselight I could use simple techniques, like dodging, to enhance and underscore the looks – and also to meet the extremely tight deadlines on this project.”
FutureWorks was founded in 2007, and has been working with FilmLight from the beginning on implementing advanced colour management from camera to screen. “It gives us an edge over our competitors, as we offer more creative and technical solutions to our clients,” Purav concluded. “FilmLight gives our clients immense confidence in our output.”
Sultan
Purav has recently been joined at FutureWorks by senior colourists Tushar Desai and Andreas Brueckl. Tushar has immediately started on his first project at FutureWorks, Dharma Productions’ Badrinath Ki Dulhania, while Andreas, who specialises in high-end television commercials and features, is working on multiple advertisements with the post-production house.
“What Rahul Purav and his colleagues are demonstrating is a fundamental of our industry: the need to enhance and underline the narrative through colour and texture,” said Wolfgang Lempp, founder and CEO of FilmLight. “Our goal as our Baselight tools have developed has always been to incorporate the most advanced colour science, but to present it in a way which is intuitive to the colourist, making it extremely powerful but also extremely productive.”
