How PI came to life in India

The whale leaping over a raft in the ocean spraying blue luminescence, the surreal meerkat scene - some of the most magical scenes in Ang Lee's film were created by Indian digital artists.
Writing in The New York Times, movie critic A O Scott makes gentle fun of Ang Lee's Life of Pi as a film that "is simultaneously about everything and very little indeed" .But his tone changes when he begins to speak of the Royal Bengal tiger which makes the long sea voyage with the shipwrecked Pi. "Thank Mr Lee and the gods of digital imagery, who conjure up a beast - named Richard Parker, for mildly amusing reasons - of almost miraculous vividness. His eyes, his fur, the rippling of his muscles and the skeleton beneath his skin, all of it is so perfectly rendered that you will swear that Richard Parker is real," he writes.
Life of Pi won the Oscar for best visual effects last Sunday. But many of the gods of digital imagery who breathed life into Richard Parker did so in two studios in Mumbai and Hyderabad. The computer-generated imagery (CGI) for Life of Pi was done by an LA studio called Rhythm and Hues. In 2001, R&H set up their first studio outside of America in Mumbai and in 2007, another in Hyderabad. The company has three other studios - in Kuala Lumpur, Vancouver and Kaohsiung in Taiwan, which incidentally is also where Lee hails from.
All six of those studios worked on Life of Pi. R&H says that about 45 per cent of the CGI in the film was done in India. About 700 digital artistes in total worked on the film; 300 of those were from India.
R&H has earlier also won best visual effects at the Oscars for the Golden Compass in 2008 and Babe in 1995. And in 2005, it was nominated for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lee however did not think very much of Aslan, the lion in The Chronicles of Narnia. He wanted Richard Parker to be better, more lifelike. Lee asked the team, says Alex Fernandes, an animator with R&H in Mumbai, "to break new ground".
When the film was ready, as Lee looked back at his handiwork and nodded to himself that their creation was real enough to be believed by his audience , he credited one key scene for having convinced him that they had done a good enough job. This was the one where Richard Parker is first discovered in the lifeboat, says the R&H Mumbai team, over phone, and it was put together in India.
Kevin Coutinho, technical director of animation and layout, refuses to pin down the credit to a name because it was a "group effort". It is difficult, he points out, to break a movie like this down into "this was put together here and that was put together there".
"Because," he adds, "if you were to press pause anytime during the movie, you would, in that one frame, see the work of as many as six to seven departments. The animation might have been done in Mumbai , the lighting in KL, and the compositing (finalising of a shot) in LA."
Alex does name a few scenes where his team made significant contributions - Pi sitting on a tree in his family zoo in Pondicherry or feeding Richard Parker, the flying fish scene, the meerkat scene, and the whale scene.
The shots of the whale jumping over Pi's raft light the screen up with a soft blue haze, apparently created by the bioluminescence (the natural light generated and emitted) of some of the ocean's creatures. But is it lifelike? "Well," says Alex, "bio-luminescence is found in the oceans. T hat whales breach the surface of the ocean is a well-known fact too."
He admits that they may have made their whale look somewhat more resplendent than in reality but they wanted to give the audience a never-before visual experience. And yes, he agrees, whales don't jump as high as the one in their movie. "But that's because Ang Lee wanted the whale to jump right over the raft... and there is a long precedence of whales doing that in Hollywood."
That humourous streak continues into the R&H team's description of how they finally watched the movie when it hit the theatres. "At the IMAX at Wadala, and in complete silence... " Usually, they say, they make a lot of noise at movies. "But this time they were just so impressed with the work that they had done."