Watch: Salman Khan makes an appearance on Aamir Khan's TV show
The special episode of 'Satyamev Jayate' that features Salman Khan as a special guest will be aired this Sunday at 11 am.
Mumbai: Aamir Khan
has a surprise for his ‘Satyamev Jayate’ viewers this Sunday, as he
welcomes a very special guest in the next episode, and it’s none other
than Bollywood star Salman Khan.
In the coming
episode’s teaser, we see host Aamir talking to a member of the audience,
who wished to thank Salman personally, and Aamir made it possible. Is
there anything this man can’t do?
The two stars hug and it is followed by them sharing a joke on stage. What will happen next?
This special episode of ‘Satyamev Jayate’ will be aired on Sunday 11 am.
'Diwali wishes to you and your family'
A look at the top tweets from your favourite Bollywood celebrities:Several celebrities took to Twitter to wish their fans on Diwali and share their plans.
Raveena Tandon asked her fans to do charity: ‘Wishing you all, friends a happy Diwali and a prosperous new year! This year think of those who aren't that fortunate. Your Diwali will only be more blessed! Parts of our country faced floods, calamities, can also donate in those funds. My kids love only the more demure firecrackers, phuljari, anar, chakli, besides that they donate the rest of their firecracker money.’
Dhanush wrote: ’Happy Diwali tweeps :) Anegan teaser 2 lacs views in 15 hours ! Thank u 4 dis amazin love nd support. And I hear kaththi is rocking.cant wait.’
Farhan Akhtar tweeted: ‘Morning. Delhi sched on #Do complete. Now, back to Mumbai to celebrate Diwali and some precious family & friends time.'
R Madhavan wished his fans: ‘Wish you a very very happy Diwali and a prosperous year ahead. Big year for me so thank you for all your wishes. Muchhhhhhh love.’
Shruti Haasan (in the picture) tweeted: ‘Deepavali wishes to you and your family! May it be blessed bright and prosperous!!’
Happy birthday, Parineeti Chopra!
Parineeti Chopra celebrated her birthday on October 22 and Shraddha Kapoor took to Twitter to wish her.
‘Sweetaaaa today is the day to have lots of meethaaa!!! Happy happy birthday to youuu @ParineetiChopra Have a KILLer one!!! :)’ she tweeted.
Riteish Deshmukh also wished Parineeti: 'Happy birthday @ParineetiChopra - have great one- much love.'
Parineeti will be next seen in Kill Dil, which releases on November 14.
Happy New Year team reaches Dubai
The Happy New Year team has landed in Dubai for the film's premiere.
Director Farah Khan tweeted: ‘Almost to the last lap of the journey of #HNY ..back to where v had started.. DUBAI !!’
Shah Rukh Khan added: ‘And HNY team is back to release the film where it all started, Dubai….“And we all end up where we started…” Kismet.’
Gone Girl is a must watch
Shabana Azmi, who is currently in the UK, recently saw David Fincher’s much-awaited film Gone Girl.
‘Gone Girl is twisted and brutal but riveting. Rosamund Pike is superb. Must watch,’ Azmi wrote.
Shobhaa De has also praised the film and wrote: ‘' Gone Girl ' - the brutality of marriage. What a savage and powerful portrait of 'Wedded bliss' . Must watch movie of the decade.’
The film, which is based on the Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel by the same name, will release in India on October 31.
What moved Anushka Sharma at MAMI
Anushka Sharma, who attended the closing ceremony of the 16th Mumbai Film Festival, was moved by everyone's passion for cinema at the fest.
‘Just attended the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival award ceremony. I'm deeply inspired & moved by seeing the pure passion 4 cinema everyone shared,’ the actress tweeted.
TV actors share their Diwali plans
Here's what the actors have to say about their Diwali celebrations plans:
Adaa Khan: Diwali is not the same without family and friends. We have a family get together and we will burst crackers, have dinner together, gorge on sweets and play cards.
Ragini Khanna: Diwali is my favourite time of the year. From Dhanteras to Bhaiduj, I love all of it. Sparklers, 'diyas' and the happiness of being together with family fill so much happiness in our lives. I love shopping for new clothes, bursting crackers and also the fact that we get to eat so many sweets.
Amrita Prakash: Diwali, for me, means buying new clothes, performing Laxmi pooja, making sweets and spending time with my loved ones. Every Diwali I decorate my house with candles and rangolis. Diwali is all about celebration and meeting your friends and family.
Rahul Sharma: Diwali is a festival to spend time with family and close friends. I have a small pooja at home and then catch up with family, friends and their kids. We eat a good meal, burst a few crackers and play cards.
Pariva Pranati: I think Diwali is one of the most beautiful festivals. Each and every place is so well lit that it looks heavenly. I love the lights but I am not a fan of the noise or the smoke. I feel we should be responsible citizens and every festival should be taken as an opportunity to do something good for this world.
Barkha Bisht: I really look forward to celebrating Diwali because I relive my childhood memories of it through my daughter Meira. Her excitement and fun adds light to my life.
Siddharth Arora: We have a family get together every Diwali and have fun burning crackers. It is mandatory in our family that all the cousins, from wherever they are, come to Banaras.
Aparna Dixit: It is one of my favourite times of the year. I am very fond of decorations, especially lights. I embellish my whole house with 'diyas', colourful lights, rangolis and flowers during Diwali. I love the whole atmosphere around us. Diyas lit around our colony, the lighting and the happiness of being together with my friends and family is why it makes Diwali all the more special to me.
Anushka Sharma to sizzle in her first item number in Dil Dhadakne Do
We know that Anushka Sharma is playing Ranveer Singh's love interest in the Zoya Akhtar movie 'Dil Dhadakne Do'.
However, what is interesting is that Anushka will be performing her first ever item number in the movie.
Anushka Sharma, who recently wrapped up Zoya Akhtar's "Dil Dhadakne Do" opposite ex-beau Ranveer Singh, will be portraying a never-seen-before avatar in the film.
Sources said the song is called ‘Swing’ and even though some other members of the ensemble cast that includes Priyanka Chopra, Farhan Akhtar, Anil Kapoor and Shefali Shah are also seen in the same song; the spotlight will be on Anushka who is performing her first full-fledged item number.
Anushka's character in the movie is said to be quite hippie. She plays Ranveer Singh's girlfriend.
After the huge success of "Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara", which was also a multi-starrer flick, "Dil Dhadakne Do" is touted to be Zoya's next big project with a massive budget.
The posters of "Dil Dhadakne Do" have already created quite a buzz among the audience, who are now eagerly waiting for the movie to hit screens on 5 June 2015.
"Dil Dhadakne Do" is based on a Punjabi family who are on a cruise trip. The vacation helps them discover love and friendship among each other.
Priyanka Chopra and Ranveer Singh, who romanced each other in "Gunday", will reportedly play siblings in the flick.
While, Farhan and Priyanka Chopra play a couple, Anushka Sharma plays Singh's love interest. The "Band Baaja Baaraat" couple will be seen sharing screen space for the first time post their break-up.
Zoya's ensemble cast flick "Dil Dhadakne Do" has been shot extensively in Europe, including Spain, France, Italy and Turkey. Some parts of the film have also been shot in Tunisia.
Produced by Ritesh Sidwani, the film is set to release worldwide on 5 June 2015.
From 2D to 3D: How Hollywood Gains an Extra Dimension in India
It's no secret that many of the "3D" films we see were actually shot
in 2D and then processed to add the extra dimension. One of the latest
examples of this process is Sin City: A Dame to Kill For - the
processing of this film was done almost entirely in India by Prime
Focus, a Mumbai headquartered company which has offices in USA and
London.
The current craze for 3D movies can be traced to James Cameron's 2009 hit, Avatar. Even when people were panning the story, lavish praise was heaped on the visuals and particularly the 3D effects. After the success of Avatar there was a rush to make 3D movies even as cinema halls updated their projectors to support 3D. Making a movie in 3D using specialised equipment the way Cameron did was an expensive proposition though, and turning 2D films into 3D was seen as the next best thing. One of the first films to try and ride this wave was Clash of the Titans. The decision to go 3D came late in the process and the conversion had to be done with a very short timeline. The makers of Clash of the Titans looked at a lot of different studios, and Merzin Tavaria, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Director, Prime Focus, claims they were the only ones willing to do this in 10 weeks.
As it turned out, the rushed worked got a lot of criticism, and a few years later even the director of the movie Louis Leterrier spoke most unfavourably about the conversion. He told the Huffington Post, "It was famously rushed and famously horrible. It was absolutely horrible, the 3D. Nothing was working. it was just a gimmick to steal money from the audience. I'm a good boy and I rolled with the punches and everything, but it's not my movie."
Merzin Tavaria, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Director, Prime Focus
Despite the criticisms, Tavaria says that movie studios were interested by how quickly - and at a fraction of the usual cost - Prime Focus had delivered its results. This would lead to getting more work over time, with Prime Focus even playing a part in the 3D conversion for some very high profile projects such as the Star Wars prequels, Gravity, and Guardians of the Galaxy. The company now works on three main services - visual effects (VFX), stereo conversion (2D to 3D) and animation. Conversion remains the bulk of the studio's work, and in Prime Focus' office we got to know more.
From 2D to 3D
In a 3D movie, each frame is shown twice, with a small offset between objects in these. The projector polarises the image, and thanks to the 3D glasses you wear, each eye sees a slightly different image. Your brain combines these into a single, 3D image. This happens automatically, but if the 3D is not converted properly, it can cause headaches and disorientation among viewers.
The conversion from 2D to 3D is a long process that stars at Prime Focus' offices in Vancouver and LA. Each show (what a movie is called in the VFX industry) is divided into reels, sequences, scenes and shots - most movies are anywhere between 2,000 to 3,000 shots. All the shots meant for conversion are then broken down into their separate elements. A cloud-based setup with a Web-login is used to check the notes saved from supervisors based around the world, with instructions for specific shots.
"We don't have to people shouting across the room that something is in the shared folder," says Tavaria. "The moment something is saved it is easily accessible for everyone at any time."
Once the files are in place, employees - usually in Prime Focus' Chandigarh and Hyderabad offices - begin with rotoscoping, a process where animators trace over live action footage frames. This is a very old process used by animators - for example, Disney cartoons would use real footage of animals and people moving to create realistic animation. The same technique was also used to insert graphics and cartoon characters into movies - in the old Star Wars films rotoscoping was used to turn sticks held by actors into the series' famous lightsabers.
In the early days, an animator would have to draw on each frame, one still at a time, by hand. Today, the process is handled by computers, but the process of tracing over the footage remains the same, even if you use a mouse or stylus instead of a pencil.
At Prime Focus, rotocsoping is done on a computer to add outlines to highlight specific elements present in the 2D frame, using Eyeon's Fusion software. We were shown the rotoscoping work done on a shot of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. A computer generated (CG) car is in the foreground and a motorcycle is chasing it in the background. Different parts of the car are marked out in sections called mattes.
"We do only a rough matte for the background," the technical lead on the Sin City project explains. The matte is used to quickly exclude parts of the image, like a mask over the shot. This is the most important part of just about any kind of stereo conversion work, and is used no matter what process is being applied.
"For objects in the foreground like the car, and its bonnet and headlamps we cut out mattes with more precision and detail because they are very clear to the viewer," the lead explains. An object in the foreground gets divided into multiple mattes, because for example in the case of this car, different parts of it will be at different depths. If the entire car was one large matte, then the result would look like a cardboard cutout, instead of a real 3D object.
Once this is done, other employees will take the shot into proprietary software that Prime Focus uses called View-D. Using View-D the shot is then converted in three stages. First, the most basic work is plotting the outlined objects on a timeline. Objects that are supposed to be in-focus and out of focus are identified.
The next stage is the actual conversion. Each matte has a depth value associated and using a series of complex calculations, we end up with two images for each frame - one for each eye. The depth has to be applied carefully to create realistic 3D shapes, and also to ensure that the depth is applied continuously.
The third stage is quality control - after the technicians are finished, someone has to view all the shots to make sure no discrepancies have crept in. "The key lies in subtlety," says the technical lead. "We do not want to give you a headache."
This process looks even more complicated than it sounds. From rotoscoping to View-D to client approval, a single shot can take anywhere between 14-16 days to complete.
Made in India
Prime Focus has built a flourishing business in turning Hollywood's movies from 2D into 3D, and the quality of their work has come a long way in the journey from Clash of the Titans to Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. As we saw, a lot of the work is highly labour intensive - the rotoscoping doesn't happen with a pen and a projector anymore, but each and every shot that is being converted is still being mapped by a person, by hand. A big reason for the success of Prime Focus is that the company has been able to offer these services at extremely competitive prices thanks to of the low cost of talent in India, something Tavaria is only happy to admit.
"Why is an iPhone being made in China?" he asks. "Because it is cheap! That's our strength. We can continue doing work in LA [and] go bankrupt [instead]."
At the same time, Tavaria defends the quality of the work that the company is doing. "It may be cheap but it is good," he says. "We are able to do high-end work here. We spend a lot of time training and getting more experienced."
The added experience has also led to an increase in VFX work, something Prime Focus has been doing for several Indian movies as well. Most recently, it worked on VFX for the Hrithik Roshan starrer Bang Bang. With more Indian films using special effects, we could see a larger VFX industry in India coming up now, instead of it being just an outsourcing hub for American films.
Before signing off, we'll leave you with one insider secret we learnt during the course of this story: next time you are out to watch a 3D movie in a theatre, get the middle seats in one of rows towards the middle of the hall - they are the ones with the best view of the 3D effects.
The current craze for 3D movies can be traced to James Cameron's 2009 hit, Avatar. Even when people were panning the story, lavish praise was heaped on the visuals and particularly the 3D effects. After the success of Avatar there was a rush to make 3D movies even as cinema halls updated their projectors to support 3D. Making a movie in 3D using specialised equipment the way Cameron did was an expensive proposition though, and turning 2D films into 3D was seen as the next best thing. One of the first films to try and ride this wave was Clash of the Titans. The decision to go 3D came late in the process and the conversion had to be done with a very short timeline. The makers of Clash of the Titans looked at a lot of different studios, and Merzin Tavaria, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Director, Prime Focus, claims they were the only ones willing to do this in 10 weeks.
As it turned out, the rushed worked got a lot of criticism, and a few years later even the director of the movie Louis Leterrier spoke most unfavourably about the conversion. He told the Huffington Post, "It was famously rushed and famously horrible. It was absolutely horrible, the 3D. Nothing was working. it was just a gimmick to steal money from the audience. I'm a good boy and I rolled with the punches and everything, but it's not my movie."
Merzin Tavaria, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Director, Prime Focus
Despite the criticisms, Tavaria says that movie studios were interested by how quickly - and at a fraction of the usual cost - Prime Focus had delivered its results. This would lead to getting more work over time, with Prime Focus even playing a part in the 3D conversion for some very high profile projects such as the Star Wars prequels, Gravity, and Guardians of the Galaxy. The company now works on three main services - visual effects (VFX), stereo conversion (2D to 3D) and animation. Conversion remains the bulk of the studio's work, and in Prime Focus' office we got to know more.
From 2D to 3D
In a 3D movie, each frame is shown twice, with a small offset between objects in these. The projector polarises the image, and thanks to the 3D glasses you wear, each eye sees a slightly different image. Your brain combines these into a single, 3D image. This happens automatically, but if the 3D is not converted properly, it can cause headaches and disorientation among viewers.
The conversion from 2D to 3D is a long process that stars at Prime Focus' offices in Vancouver and LA. Each show (what a movie is called in the VFX industry) is divided into reels, sequences, scenes and shots - most movies are anywhere between 2,000 to 3,000 shots. All the shots meant for conversion are then broken down into their separate elements. A cloud-based setup with a Web-login is used to check the notes saved from supervisors based around the world, with instructions for specific shots.
"We don't have to people shouting across the room that something is in the shared folder," says Tavaria. "The moment something is saved it is easily accessible for everyone at any time."
Once the files are in place, employees - usually in Prime Focus' Chandigarh and Hyderabad offices - begin with rotoscoping, a process where animators trace over live action footage frames. This is a very old process used by animators - for example, Disney cartoons would use real footage of animals and people moving to create realistic animation. The same technique was also used to insert graphics and cartoon characters into movies - in the old Star Wars films rotoscoping was used to turn sticks held by actors into the series' famous lightsabers.
In the early days, an animator would have to draw on each frame, one still at a time, by hand. Today, the process is handled by computers, but the process of tracing over the footage remains the same, even if you use a mouse or stylus instead of a pencil.
At Prime Focus, rotocsoping is done on a computer to add outlines to highlight specific elements present in the 2D frame, using Eyeon's Fusion software. We were shown the rotoscoping work done on a shot of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. A computer generated (CG) car is in the foreground and a motorcycle is chasing it in the background. Different parts of the car are marked out in sections called mattes.
"We do only a rough matte for the background," the technical lead on the Sin City project explains. The matte is used to quickly exclude parts of the image, like a mask over the shot. This is the most important part of just about any kind of stereo conversion work, and is used no matter what process is being applied.
"For objects in the foreground like the car, and its bonnet and headlamps we cut out mattes with more precision and detail because they are very clear to the viewer," the lead explains. An object in the foreground gets divided into multiple mattes, because for example in the case of this car, different parts of it will be at different depths. If the entire car was one large matte, then the result would look like a cardboard cutout, instead of a real 3D object.
Once this is done, other employees will take the shot into proprietary software that Prime Focus uses called View-D. Using View-D the shot is then converted in three stages. First, the most basic work is plotting the outlined objects on a timeline. Objects that are supposed to be in-focus and out of focus are identified.
The next stage is the actual conversion. Each matte has a depth value associated and using a series of complex calculations, we end up with two images for each frame - one for each eye. The depth has to be applied carefully to create realistic 3D shapes, and also to ensure that the depth is applied continuously.
The third stage is quality control - after the technicians are finished, someone has to view all the shots to make sure no discrepancies have crept in. "The key lies in subtlety," says the technical lead. "We do not want to give you a headache."
This process looks even more complicated than it sounds. From rotoscoping to View-D to client approval, a single shot can take anywhere between 14-16 days to complete.
Made in India
Prime Focus has built a flourishing business in turning Hollywood's movies from 2D into 3D, and the quality of their work has come a long way in the journey from Clash of the Titans to Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. As we saw, a lot of the work is highly labour intensive - the rotoscoping doesn't happen with a pen and a projector anymore, but each and every shot that is being converted is still being mapped by a person, by hand. A big reason for the success of Prime Focus is that the company has been able to offer these services at extremely competitive prices thanks to of the low cost of talent in India, something Tavaria is only happy to admit.
"Why is an iPhone being made in China?" he asks. "Because it is cheap! That's our strength. We can continue doing work in LA [and] go bankrupt [instead]."
At the same time, Tavaria defends the quality of the work that the company is doing. "It may be cheap but it is good," he says. "We are able to do high-end work here. We spend a lot of time training and getting more experienced."
The added experience has also led to an increase in VFX work, something Prime Focus has been doing for several Indian movies as well. Most recently, it worked on VFX for the Hrithik Roshan starrer Bang Bang. With more Indian films using special effects, we could see a larger VFX industry in India coming up now, instead of it being just an outsourcing hub for American films.
Before signing off, we'll leave you with one insider secret we learnt during the course of this story: next time you are out to watch a 3D movie in a theatre, get the middle seats in one of rows towards the middle of the hall - they are the ones with the best view of the 3D effects.
No comments:
Post a Comment