TUESDAY, MAY 14, 2024
Almost 2500 kilometres away from the buzzing centre of the world's biggest sports event, the FIFA World Cup, Goa still played a small part. Members of a design studio in Socorro, Upasana Nattoji Roy, founder of Switch Studio, Vishrut Manseta, production team, Saurav Roy, partner and Nigel Gomes, design manager, were working hard on creating one of the amazing visual effects for the world premiere of 'Perfect Amalgamation'. Composed by Siddharth Kasyap from SK Music Works, the concert featured stellar Indian Bollywood singers Rahat Fateh Ali Khan and Sunidhi Chauhan and composing duo Salim-Sulaiman. This unique show brought together design, animation and art with music, entertainment and Bollywood.
Explaining the role of the team members, Nigel says, "The concept development, visualisation, design and direction for all ten songs were done by Upasana Nattoji Roy. Switch Studio produced all the visuals. Vishrut Manseta helped create four of them. We needed to adapt the render files to a totally different scenography for the stage in Lusail for the FIFA World Cup Bollywood Musical Night performance in Qatar. The visuals are created through a design process that took around two and a half month from concept to delivery. We created a ‘master’ version of the show that can travel the world across different scales. Two pieces were added called ‘Marhaba’ or welcome in Arabic and the grand finale specifically for the FIFA World Cup Bollywood Musical Night performance. The adaptation for the visuals took another week."
The visuals created for this performance was one of the largest of its kind done for Indian fusion music on a world stage. Most of the songs in this show had a flavour that is led by the hero instrument. "Quite a few Indian instruments evoke the sound of the regions they come from or are even associated with mythological characters. Each of the visuals were thus custom designed in a way to celebrate each instrument. To add to the process my background in dance also helps me visualise like a participant in the performance," says Upasana Nattoji Roy.
Speaking about the challenges of working on the visuals for the concert, she says, "Each song in the show has a totally different sound. Each song had its own moodboard to map out the colours and visual elements that the music evokes. Once we had outlined the abstract narrative for each song, the style sheets were created for the highlight points of the song along with a visual ‘bed’. Based on this, we decided on the members of our team who would work on the project. Overall, we used Photoshop and vector illustrations, stock videos, shot videos with chroma, 2D animation, 3D models, and particular systems in After Effects and C4D."
She further adds, "In the case of this show, it was originally created to be behind the musicians and it was kept in mind that there would be parts of the screen that would be blocked by the musicians standing in front. But since we wanted to deliver visuals that could have a longer shelf life without a high additional cost to the clients, we created ‘dead’ sections. This paid off very well for the FIFA event as the stage was under the band and exponentially larger, creating a bold impactful visual experience. This adaptation needed design intervention as well as a pipeline to render out super large files in a very short time. While we were reinterpreting it for the Lusail stage and making production files ready, the SK music works team rendered out the files due to the paucity of time."
The team is next co-producing a show, ‘When Walls Dance,’ which is a performance that includes Bharatanatyam, Warli art and animation which will premiere on January 14, 2023 in Mumbai. They have also received a grant from the British Council with support from BeFantastic and Future Everything (UK) to develop an interactive art installation called ‘Give me a Sign’ which uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning along with traditional ways of creating animation and art. This will be presented at the Future Fantastic festival in Manchester and Bangalore and is set to travel to other parts of the world.
"We are also working with Goan and Goa based artists and performers for a few other projects. One such project that is nearing completion is a Virtual Museum commissioned by the Indian Foundation for the Arts for the Kodava Community," says Saurav Roy. Switch Studio also does title design and animation for shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube Originals and other OTT platforms
