India's growing role behind Hollywood scenes
By Anand Giridharadas International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006
MUMBAI, India After thanking the Academy and their mothers, Oscar winners of the future may well thank India, too.
Legions of Indians already do the West's busy work, whether filling out tax forms or
transcribing doctors' dictations. But now India is quietly entering a preserve of high-
end creativity previously out of its reach: Hollywood. While Los Angeles sleeps, Indian
visual effects artists are making Superman fly, converting horses into centaurs for
"Narnia" and planting an animated Garfield the cat in the hands of live actors.
The trend is confined to a handful of Indian studios, but it traversed a milestone this year when
"The Chronicles of Narnia" became the first Hollywood movie with a substantial Indian
contribution to be nominated for an Academy Award for visual effects. Fifty Indians worked on the
movie in Mumbai, and their hearts sank last week when it lost the Oscar to "King Kong."
This is not to suggest that Indians will soon be writing most Hollywood plots
or that auditions will have to be conducted from Mumbai. But the overseas
assignment of visual effects work illustrates the way Indian workers are
chipping away at an imagined barrier between drudge work and the creative
process.
"I don't think creativity is going to be limited to the West," said Prashant Babu Buyyala,
managing director of Rhythm & Hues India, the Mumbai arm of the Hollywood visual effects studio
that was the lead effects maker on "Narnia."
"The idea of saying they'll never take out our innovation, they'll just do things
cheaper - that's just a protective statement," Richard Hollander, the president of
Rhythm's film division, said by telephone from Los Angeles.
Rhythm's India office might at first seem like yet another Indian back office
undercutting the West. The entry- level salary for an artist in the India
office is $2,700 a year, or $1.35 an hour, a pittance next to the $40,000 a
year, or $20 an hour, commanded by new recruits in the company's Los Angeles
headquarters.
And the labor-intensive work may foster an impression of the kind of repetitive drudgery
that Westerners are happy to send to foreign lands. Hunched over his computer one day
last week, an artist at the studio was toiling frame by frame to adjust the lighting in a
scene from the coming film "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties." The four-second
shot will occupy three artists for two weeks. Doing such detailed work on a whole movie
would take one artist 148 years.
But Rhythm India is no sweatshop. It is treated by its Los Angeles headquarters
as a second office, not a back office, largely because visual effects are
unlike most of the work shipped to India from the West. Unlike accounting or
call-center work, visual effects blend technical and creative elements
inextricably; every worker has to be logical and imaginative at once to make,
for example, an animated lion's muscles look real.
"Visual effects is part of the creativity," said Edward Jay Epstein, author of "The Big
Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood," a recent industry exposé. "There is not one movie made in
Hollywood - there are at least two. The first is the actor's unit. That provides one layer. The second is the
visual and sound effects, done in post-production, often with material created in computers or shot in
separate stunt units."
In movies like "The Lord of The Rings," "Harry Potter" and "Pirates of the Caribbean," he
added, "the second layer is even more important than the first."
The result is that workers here are coddled as artists. They work in a stylish
East Asian-style maze of huts with bamboo roofs. Despite India's six-day
workweeks, here they work five, and they get three meals a day, free insurance
and on-site yoga. Rhythm also reimburses employees for after-work courses
ranging from cooking to dancing to painting.
"It's all about throwing money on employees," said Saraswathi Balgam, director of operations at Rhythm, who
gets irked when the word "outsourcing" is used. "This facility," she insisted, "is not set up
to cut costs."
Rhythm's India facility does cut costs. But the company is adamant in avoiding what Buyyala called the
"widget mentality" of the Indian animation industry, which in 2005 recorded $285 million in
revenue. Much of that total reflects the "factory mind- set," Buyyala said, not "the creative
mind-set, where you do something that's never been done before."
Hollander said, "We don't understand why, with appropriate training, we can't do the same
thing in India" as in Los Angeles. "We are pushing it as fast as it can go," he said.
Five years ago, when the India office was opened, it did do the grunt work of
visual effects. One common assignment was to airbrush wires from characters,
like Superman, who dangled from the ceiling but were supposed to be shown
flying.
The work matured film by film, and before long Indians were engaged in the art of
"compositing," in which layers of images are merged - as in "Garfield," in
which an animated cat is superimposed onto a real-life shot.
The Indians' greatest challenge so far was "Narnia," a movie that, at its peak,
involved the coordination of 450,000 mostly animated characters. The movie was
co-produced by Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media.
To make centaurs for "Narnia," Indian animators had to take shots of men riding
horses, then digitally slide the riders forward, erase their legs and the horse's head
and merge the rider's torso with the horse's neck. This was to be done, not once, but on
each individual frame, with 24 frames every second. A two-hour movie has 7,200 frames.
Today, "Garfield" is the challenge, and the office here is already doing work that was
not entrusted to it on "Narnia." In one cubicle, an artist was running a simulation of
the cat galloping to test whether its knee looked realistic when bent.
It will take three years before Rhythm's India facility can do a film like "Garfield" on
its own, Balgam said. It will take longer to make a "Narnia," much of whose animation
concepts originated in Los Angeles and were sent to India for fleshing out.
Companies like Rhythm show how the impact on the West of sending work offshore is
inevitably mixed, less black-and-white than politicians often say it is. Plainly,
$40,000 jobs are being done here for $2,700, and over time Rhythm & Hues will
send more of its routine work to India. Without India, some work would have been
performed by new hires in the United States.
But Rhythm's experience illustrates that moving work overseas can help companies even as
it slows their domestic recruitment. Before its India office came up to speed, the
company bid for a Harry Potter movie but lost to a lower-cost British business. But when
"Narnia" came along, with its 50 Indian workers reducing costs, Rhythm clinched
the $40 million deal.
And the facility, Balgam said, capitalizes not only on India's lower wages but
also on what might be called enthusiasm arbitrage.
"If you speak to this kid," she said, motioning to one of her artists, "he's working
on a Hollywood film, and he's 24. What we have is that we're passionate, and we haven't seen much,
and so we're still excited about everything."
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Anthony P. D'Costa, Professor
Comparative International Development
Abe Fellow (2005-06)
University of Washington
1900 Commerce Street
Tacoma, WA 98402, USA
Phone: (253) 692-4462
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