PBS: Director Kireet Khurana talks about his film Toonpur Ka Superrhero : Bollywood News

Could you enlighten us with the production pipeline of your film briefly? How long did it take to piece it together?

The entire pre-production phase kicked off, and completed in my studio. Pre-production consisted of Storyboards, Layouts, environments, prop and character designs and sorting out the color keys. Weve also done a bit of the animation; we set the bible and the tone for the film. This planning and visualization phase lasted about eight months. Production process was simple, since we meticulously planned out the film in pre-production. When Ajay came to the chroma sets to shoot the film, we would share the storyboards with him. We would educate them with the 2D environment and how they would look in that space for their reference.

Additionally, we would take the actors through the entire 3D animation blocking phase of the scene; this gives the actors a sense of how theyd look in the shots. Although in the film, locations keep changing, the actors are still present on the chroma sets. With this the actors get a glimpse and realize the gravity of the situation of the scene before they start performing for the shot. We shot the principal actors on chroma backgrounds and took those shots and edited the whole film, where we cleaned out the green screen backgrounds and fused the CGI elements that were to be used for the scenes. Overall it took two and half years to complete.

As a director, what was the brief that you gave the artists in regards to modeling the characters?

Im an artist myself and Ive learnt animation the classical way. Ive studied anatomy for years; my team designed the characters under my supervision. The idea was to get the anatomy of the animation characters as right as possible. If youre from the animation industry, you and I both know that there are hidden gaps that come along with such projects. This is mainly because, they arent trained artists sitting on the machines theyre technicians.

My job was to ensure that these gaps are filled in as much as possible, I have to ensure that the anatomy is right, the facial rigs are flexible, there are strong line of action of the characters poses, to make sure that the rigs offer enough suppleness to achieve animation principles such as squash and stretch which is used in cartoon type animation.