Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan are very hands-on in planning action sequences: VFX head at YRF

3 months ago | 5 Views

Last year Shah Rukh Khan's Pathaan and Salman Khan's Tiger 3 featured some heavy action sequences, that wowed audiences worldwide. Those sequences also had a lot of VFX work involved, with both the projects handled by Yash Raj Films' VFX division yFX. Sherry Bharda, who heads tit spoke to Variety in a new interview, where she revealed how these sequences are extensively planned and executed before, with a lot of ‘hands on’ involvement from its stars Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan.

How the action sequences are planned

Speaking to Variety, Sherry said, “These sequences can’t be made in a linear fashion, they all have to be fairly interactive and inclusive, because where one person hands over to the other, it cannot be downstream, it all has to be planned before... These sequences usually need an alignment from all the creative stakeholders in the process. So Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, they are very savvy and hands on in this process. When the director shows them the pre-viz that we’ve done, which is almost like a small simplified version of the actual edit that they’ll see eventually, they have their ideas, they have their thoughts, they know what they’re supposed to do on set. "

More details about Tiger 3 action

She further added, "The scale of it had to be even bigger than Pathaan, because now the audiences had seen and appreciated what had happened on the Tiger-Pathaan sequence there. But given the limited time, we used extensive 3D visualization. It means actually, on the computer, animating and putting into place every shot that is eventually going to be then shot on a live stage, so that you were making the sequence before you even went to shoot... And we knew if we didn’t do this we would be dead in the water because there was no time for that usual ‘fix it in post’ situation, it had to all be planned from the beginning. So this process called pre-visualization, which we do to a large extent on all action sequences, just so that we can have this planning down earlier, we did this at a much deeper in-depth level for this one particular sequence because of the limited time."

Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan traded cameos in each other's YRF Spy Universe films, Tiger 3 and Pathaan, respectively, last year. They are also touted to share the screen space in lead roles in the upcoming YRF Spy Universe film, Tiger Vs Pathaan.