April, 2011

Mr. Sreyans Bardia, Director of India Operations, botvfx was recently interviewed by online magazine CG Today. The main focus of the interview was WHAT makes the bots stand out in a competitive rotoscopy outsourcing fraternity. 

Copied below is the link to the complete interview by CG Today, detailing the leadership challenges undertaken by Mr. Sreyans Bardia to ensure botvfx, India runs like a well oiled machine:

http://www.cgtoday.com/index.php/interviews/production-studios/1448-sreyans-bardia-director-of-india-operations-and-head-of-production-at-bot-vfx.html

November, 2010

botvfx would like to recognize and congratulate our very own head-bot Hitesh Shah, on officially achieving his Visual Effects Society Membership - an honor bestowed on persons with more than 5 years of experience in the industry.

Visual Effects Society -  The Visual Effects Society is the entertainment industry's only organization representing the full breadth of visual effects practitioners including artists, technologists, model makers, educators, studio leaders, supervisors, PR/marketing specialists and producers in all areas of entertainment from. (www.visualeffectssociety.com)

Cheers!

An extraterrestrial race arrives on Earth with seemingly good intentions, only to slowly reveal their true machinations as they become more and more ingrained into human society. “The Visitors” (V), a new television series on ABC has garnered quite the audience, making botvfx a proud accomplice to the show’s Zoic Studios.

Initial conversations with LA based, Zoic Studios centered around roto and keying services being offered from botvfx. However given our skill set the scope was expanded to include delivery of end-to-end compositing for the whole project. Production Head-Bot, Sreyans Bardia states: “What started as a small assignment became a 40 shot project with a 2 week turnover”.

Zoic Studios provided Master and repeat stills which needed to be worked on within a compressed time-frame. In order to manage the pipeline effectively similar shots were bucketed together allowing the bots to perform roto, keying and comp simultaneously. Bucketing helped maintain continuity by allowing the bots to apply similar nodes to similar shots.

Defocused shots required more attention. As keying was not an option, The bots had to painstakingly roto out the de-focused characters to get articulate mattes. Jr Roto Artist, Rajvel recalls the extreme concentration required to prevent grey fringes from seeping into the matte edges. A few shots that had motion blur also required special treatment. Paint artist, Srikant mentions “Keying proved unsatisfactory in capturing the motion blur. In such cases the blur effect had to be recreated using paint in the final comp-outs”.

Comping over BG plates required a fair amount of manual intervention. In many shots there were no track points available on the BG therefore these tracks were created manually by the bots using depth of field, experience and eye judgment, creating realistic looking shots. To maintain the continuity in the shots, once the comp work was completed, all of the repeat stills were combined and checked for color correction.   Zoic would then review the work in overcut and feed through the creative inputs of the director.

In the end with “The Visitors” botvfx proved once again that with its deep knowhow of outsourcing it can be a powerful ally to production houses looking at gaining a competitive advantage without compromising on quality.

Warburtons, a British bakery, has launched a television campaign exaggerating the daily bread delivery process into an emotional parody of nostalgic Hollywood feature films.

Once again Absolute Post tied up with botvfx to get immaculate mattes within a compressed time frame. A combination of green screen extraction and roto was used to create the clean matte plates. The mattes were used to change the background and re-create a more dramatic environment suitable to the commercial’s emotions.

The spot begins at the ending to a championship hockey game with fans rushing off their seats, arms raised in excitement demanding a re-match. Not in the mood for compromise the boisterous crowd begins to stomp their feet and chant aggressively pushing the players to emerge from below the stadium, ready to play an “encore” match.

Absolute Post simulated a real game by filming the diehard fans in the stadium and the players on the rink separately. Seamless mattes of the crowd were generated by botvfx. The low lighting in which the stadium crowd had been shot made individual hair and hand movement details challenging. In order to get seamless mattes the BOTs had to maintain exacting precision during roto of the fan’s hair and hands within each frame while simultaneously avoiding any of the white background interference. The end result; a flawless set of mattes – worthy of an encore!

Procter and Gamble wanted the Olay Bath Wash experience to be an indulgent beauty ritual that goes beyond the realms of simple cleansing. For this Statchi and Satchi, New York developed the concept of an underwater woman in choreography with a ribbon. The original campaign was shot with a monochrome ribbon but that failed to communicate the USP of the product, being two separate creams.

In steps the team from botvfx who helped commercial editing studio Cut & Run create the required alpha mattes for the proposed color correction. The challenge was to work with the flow of the ribbons underwater and yet maintain the sharpness needed for the mattes. A task performed with ease by the highly mechanical and attention to detail (Ro)Bots. In the end the final commercial clearly communicates the bathing indulgence by using the pink ribbon as a metaphor for the moisturizing liquid contained within the Olay Body Wash and a white ribbon for the lather crème.

The bots once again prove they have the ability to complete any project with attention to detail irrespective of location.