Interview Tata Elxsi

AN INTERVIEW WITH Tata Elxsi

Q. Firstly, I would like to thank you for your time and willingness to share your thoughts with the CG community. Could you please start off by introducing yourself and giving us a little background information, facilities and services provided by Tata Elxsi.?

Visual Computing Labs, a Division of Tata Elxsi offers services in the areas of Animation, VFX and Games. Our core competence is graphics and its application to various end-uses such as animation content for TV and for Films; Visual effects and CG that goes into live-action films and into TV commercials; asset-building and engine development for Games.

We have a very talented team of professionals based out of the facility in Mumbai, India. Our artists use latest state-ofthe-art technology by virtue of ours being a part of Tata Elxsi which is a strong technology development company with the most prestigious list of clients worldwide.

Tata Elxsi itself is one of the 9 companies in the Tata group. The turnover of the Tata group is USD Bn with 300,000 employees (largest employer in the private sector) and the highest market cap in India. The group is built on the philosophy of giving back to society what we earn from them and has been practicing Corporate Social Responsibility for over 140 years of being in business in India.

The Tatas are a very respected business group known to attain leadership in addressed markets through Trust and through Ethical practices.

Q. Tell us a bit about your pipeline and how data is shared between various departments?

The whole production pipeline is organized to derive optimum throughput. The systems in the unit are connected through high-speed networks to facilitate the objective of sharing data and resources with minimum latencies. An entire department is involved in this quest to increase throughputs and to make every resource available to the pipe.

Our Technical team has set up the pipe with the twin objectives of sustainability over time and at the same time, not

AN INTERVIEW WITH Tata Elxsi

being restricted by specific technologies. The goal is to be able to deliver to spec and to have a system that’s still flexible.

At the beginning of every project, Directory structures and naming conventions are mutually arrived at with the client. All artists work with common assets through a centralized server.

Q. Please tell us about the total number of workstations; render farms, animators, modelers, software used in Elxsi. And how long does it take to complete a typical project?

At VCL, we address a variety of market verticals and hence, the production team is servicing multiple projects on the floor. Each project is given the required resources that it requires, as determined at the planning stage. Some resources like renderfarms are common. There is a project component and there is a studio component when it comes to resources.

In terms of Technology, we use Maya for 3D animation and its Flames plus Fusion for Compositing apart from various project-specific tools that are deployed. For example, we use Massive software for battle-sequences and crowds.

Since we address both Theatrical and Television markets, project durations vary from a few days to months and even

AN INTERVIEW WITH Tata Elxsi

more than a year in the case of large projects. We do a lot of R&D work too prior to commencing production which is the time when we learn new softwares and new techniques.

Q. You recently completed a work on a bollywood movie Dhoom 2, so how much you are satisfy with the results and please also tell us how much quality affected according to the budget?

Dhoom was very satisfying for our team because of the sheer variety of work and the creative freedom to contribute at the artists level. The film had over 45 minutes of work in over 600 shots. It had elements of R&D, testing new softwares/technology and a tremendous learning opportunity. The commitment and passion of our artists who worked on it is there to see in the final output which has been appreciated by the client, by the viewing public and even by the film critics.

Working with Yashraj Films is a pleasure because they want the best quality output for their audiences and there are no compromises. For Yashraj Films, Visual Computing Labs is a natural choice for the level of quality that they expect and for our ability to undertake research to determine what works best for each shot. This level of seriousness and commitment to their film is what brings to us clients like Yashraj, Karan Johar, Ashutosh, Rakesh Omprakash Mehra and Amir Khan who always work only with the best in the business.