Ae Watan Mere Watan VFX: recreating history with FutureWorks

Recreating a well-documented historical event requires an unmatched level of VFX realism, and a lot of data. That was the challenge for FutureWorks when the studio was tasked with recreating 1940s Bombay for the feature film Ae Watan Mere Watan (which translates as Oh Country My Country). FutureWorks turned to Katana’s power and flexibility to bring the story to life.

Produced by Dharmatic Entertainment for Amazon Prime, the Hindi-language film tells the true story of Usha Mehta, a young Indian woman who created an underground radio station as part of the movement to end British rule in India.

We spoke to FutureWorks Senior VFX Supervisor Ashoke Choudhury, Associate VFX Supervisor Gouri Shankar, and CG Lead Pramod Khairnar, to find out how they created some of the film’s most important scenes.

Creating a 1940s period piece

In a project spanning nearly 10 months, FutureWorks completed more than 800 shots for Ae Watan Mere Watan, with a focus on realistically recreating the Indian city in 1942. The team used old newspapers and photographs from library archives as source material, which was inevitably black and white, and low quality. Their job was to translate this look into full-color film, and to assure the directorial team that this was an accurate depiction of the past.

The most challenging sequence to put together was the film’s pivotal scene in which Mahatma Gandhi gives his famous ‘Quit India’ speech, sparking the fight for the nation’s independence. 
 

To recreate the Gowalia Tank Maidan, where Gandhi made his era-defining address, the team shot plates at another location, with an almost-360-degree green screen. They then blended this with shots from the modern-day location, which now looks very different. This involved cleanup of contemporary elements like traffic lights, buses, and cars, and adding CG period assets, including historical buildings and the square’s old tram track, along with crowd simulation. 

Katana combats complexity

Having Katana integrated into the FutureWorks pipeline was essential in managing the scale and complexity of the scene. “Before we implemented Katana, we weren’t able to deal with large-scale scenes like this using our previous Maya workflow,” says Associate VFX Supervisor Gouri Shankar. “It just wasn’t possible.” 

CG Lead Pramod Khairnar explains further, highlighting the importance of Graph State Variables in Katana: “For a scene with such huge scale, high-resolution assets, and geometry, Katana makes it much easier to handle. I was able to set lighting variables in the master scene file for all shots in all one go.”

Thanks to Katana’s scalable architecture, the team was able to easily handle the huge amounts of data involved in recreating a historical look. Senior VFX Supervisor Ashoke Choudhury says: “Katana’s interface loads a lot faster than other lighting applications, with no lag anywhere.”

Katana and Nuke Bridge

Katana’s Nuke Bridge also proved invaluable on Ae Watan Mere Watan, enabling the Lighting team to exchange creative ideas with Comp. The multishot workflow enabled by the Nuke Bridge meant that the team could establish master light setups in one place, to be repeated across all shots in the scene. 

“The Nuke Bridge was really helpful — enabling us to get the viewpoint of a compositor on a shot at the lighting stage,” explains Ashoke.

The Nuke Bridge was especially useful on the film’s final scene at Bombay station. Depicting Mehta’s release from prison, reference plates for the scene were filmed at Bandra station on the outskirts of the modern-day city, with the original station then created in CG. 

The night-time shot involved a very slowly moving camera traveling down from a high point until reaching the street. The slow speed meant that it wasn’t possible to compromise on the detail in the assets, because anything less than the highest quality would show up on screen.

Ashoke says: “It was much faster, and easier to iterate on the intensity and direction of the  lights with Katana, and the Nuke Bridge preview was really useful for this.”

Meeting deadlines with a seamless pipeline

Katana’s ability to slot easily into existing pipelines was a key factor in enabling FutureWorks to stick to its tight post-production schedule on this project. The team used Katana right from the asset build stage, all the way through to final lighting. 

“Integrating Katana into our ShotGrid pipeline solves a lot of redundant tasks for us so that we could focus more on the creative side of the project,” explains Ashoke. “It makes it much easier when all our assets are in the same reference. We’re able to approve assets right from the start, rather than each one being loaded into each Maya file separately.”

With Katana firmly embedded into the FutureWorks pipeline, the studio is now well placed to handle large-scale scenes with complex layers that are common in period pieces. 

“It's a big relief that we’re no longer restricted by the limitations of an application, meaning that we can take on more complex projects, even those with heavy CG demands,” says Gouri.
 

Want to know more about how Katana can support your upcoming projects? Find out what’s new in Katana 8.0.