Okay, with the film now out and doing exceptionally well by the looks of things, I can now put out that I had the fortune to produce the opening titles for Aamir Khan’s latest hit “Ghajini”, directed by A.R. Murugadoss with my main contact being VFX producer R.C. Kamalakannan who liaised between myself, Mr Murugadoss and Mr Khan.

Knowing the premise behind the film after seeing Memento several times in the past I was well aware of the concept and after seeing Aamir Khan’s press photos of his haircut I initially designed a scene that would travel through an neuron environment that would lead up to the point where he was bashed on the head, so everything would be slightly laboured to start with neurons firing all over the place, heavy use of bokeh and motion blur (which, as anyone knows in the vfx game is a bit of a pain in the backside to implement due to aliasing issues) with the odd neuron exploding into gunk with others growing, culminating on a “hero” neuron which had the trademark scar. Cue the impact (huge amounts of camera shake / change in lighting) and with a camera track back our hero neuron explodes in a shower of sparks, shockwaves (etc) taking out the entire neuron field.

Lovely.

Apart from the fact that it didn’t work. The ending was visually “ooooo” and “aaaaah” but the opening was pretty lacking which we determined early on by the 2nd preview. After negotiation with R.C. Kamalakannan, A.R. Murugadoss and Aamir Khan, we decided to up the ante by making things more stimulating for the audience by introducing the concept that we were travelling out of this guy’s head from neuron level to brain which would involve building multiple environments to travel through, something akin to Fight Club’s intro sequence and some fancy trickery with camera lens work and compositing. This worked much better overall for several reasons – initially, for me, the renderable assets were much better to handle; the initial neuron field scene that was binned even with mental ray proxies were running into about 60+ million polys which coupled with sub surface scattering shaders I’d designed, murk, incidental lighting, fogging, depth of field, motion blur, pyro elements, sparks, shockwaves, volumetrics and so on, the render times were looking pretty huge at 2k for the two minute duration as it was contained within one single environment so breaking it down into sizeable chunks wasn’t really feasible. This new concept meant that I could render out shedloads of passes from one environment while working on another which meant no massive rendering hit at the end. Perfect.

Binning the original sequence wasn’t all for nothing as I’d built the original neuron scene using a custom particle system, which is where the majority of the initial R&D went as it meant I could have neurons growing and exploding where I liked while the environment wiggled around nicely like a big flexible rubber mesh. I think the original concept I had was dangly snot or something (I think I had a cold at the time). Anyway, this system was re-used to build the opening neuron field in the second version which I tweaked to make the neuron bulbs considerably tighter together. This worked really well, yet posed the problem of flying the camera through not only a tight neuron field, but also one that was moving around and deforming constantly. The end solution was a cross between procedural camera animation to get a nice handheld feel, a collision detection system I built to interact with a proxy version of the field to keep calculation times down and a bit of hand fine-tuning. This then cranked through to an Axion field which was built by another system that built the geometry so that it interacted with each other but also prevented any intersections.

This sequence then mixed through to additional environments which aren’t necessarily scientifically accurate (but close representations of stuff I’d studied) which were constructed largely through a combination of procedural modelling and pure polygon pushing to fine-tune areas of interest close to camera and also to add in extra detail such as the "cross beam" supports in the large lovingly called "Tendrily Environment". This, via another particle environment passed through to a hypothetical tunnel conduit which led to the main brain veins.

This tunnel scene was built by hand pretty much in a short evening and consisited mainly of a single tunnel with branches off to the sides to indicate that it was part of a larger structure and to add detail and chaos to the scene I built in structures and cross beams as I dragged the camera through the tunnel so that the structures looked like stretched and tearing dough. Numerous procedural deformations later and the structure was in place. Now I had intended on having this entire structure deform as well, however after flying the camera through at speed I determined that the deformation work had done it's part and animating it would simply have been too much overkill; as we were travelling that fast we wouldn't really see the deformation animating.

This sequence was originally designed to be travelling forward; it was really effective in construction with tendrils stretching across the interior surface which gave the camera something to fly past and give the audience a sense of “oh crap we’re gonna hit iiiiitttt!!!!!”. Actually, my main objective here was to make at least one person in the audience lose their lunch as it had an awesome 1080+ degree crank on the camera while travelling forward at speed, avoiding all of these tendrils with a heavy fogging and flashes going on all over the place. However I got the call to reverse the camera motion so that we were travelling backwards like the rest of the sequence. If you get chance, when the film comes out on DVD, play that bit of the sequence backwards then image it on a screen the size of your house. That’s what I had in mind!

The end of the sequence finishes on a ferocious buffeted blood sequence and throbbing brain which was again hand-built yet animated procedurally to get the surfaces to "throb" and distort subtly to give the impression that something was travelling under the surface, such as blood or other fluids. The veins were built with another system to conform to the surface of the geometry and interact with each other so that they joined, branched and tucked into the brain's crevaces akin to reference material I sourced.

Shortly after delivery I got the call to change the colour of the last couple of environments which originally were photorealistic; the tunnel sequence had also acted as a nice transition to go from the cyan/blue environments preceding it through to a nice blood-red and gooey desaturated brain surface that looked really gross but pretty cool. Considering what the end of the sequence transitioned into (a wipe and track handled by Kamalakannan) it’s no wonder that the request to keep the colour correction in there throughout was requested, which again wasn’t an issue.

One other thing that I proposed at a late preview stage which was a quick “afterthought” but I thought would be quite nice to add a bit of claustrophobia was a camera housing layer in the comp. This added in a bit of barrel distortion to the edges of the “housing” and had some nice painted in debris around the edges and had a few interactive layers that reflected the camera’s “lens” in the housing “glass” whenever there was a bright flash. Unfortunately it got rejected but, again, judging from the crossover to the live sequence it was understandable.

I managed to catch a showing of the film over here in the UK at a cinema in Leicester while I was visiting family over Christmas. One of the sequences I’d worked on got dropped due to timing (it was designed to so it could be trimmed for score timing) and the end sequence was chopped a touch at the start and sped up a touch in the edit which was fine as the sequence was built to accomodate such editing, but it worked seamlessly, plus with the added incidental sound in there too it worked a treat.

As a side-note, I’m not “bigging up” the flick because of my work, but it’s actually really really good. Even if you’ve never seen any Indian cinema before, go see it. Definately worth the money as it's about four films in one!

Credits:

Production: Geetha Arts

Director: A.R. Murugadoss

VFX Producer: R.C. Kamalakannan

VFX Artist: Pete Draper

Software used: 3ds Max 2009, Combustion, Adobe Photoshop CS3

3ds Max neuron growth system

neuron growth R&D sequence

clip from the second initial preview that was discarded

the proposed "vomit comet" tunnel ride sequence!

latter part of the sequence, currently with photoreal colours and proposed lens housing; the blood sequence was made more vigorous in the final version with the camera buffeted around with faster blood cell animation

original photorealistic colours before requested colour correction

stills from final sequence