India’s all-time highest grossing film Baahubali

I recently sat down with the technical gurus behind India’s all-time highest grossing film Baahubali to ask one simple question: “How did you pull it off?”

If you’ve seen the film you know it’s a visual feast that infuses virtually every scene–whether romantic, intimately dramatic, or heart-poundingly violent–with breathtaking CG images. As the former COO of a major Hollywood visual effects company I know how difficult it is to pull off this sort of magical spectacle with a $150 million production budget, let alone the relatively miniscule $30 million budget the Baahubali team had at their disposal.

Meeting with me to explain their techniques and strategies were Pete Draper, the Co-Founder and Division Head at Makuta Visual Effects, the VFX house that oversaw the majority of Baahubali’s 2,500 effects shots; Raja Koduri, head of the Radeon Technologies Group at Sunnyvale, California-based AMD, which provided key technologies and hardware to the film; Roy Taylor, AMD’s Corporate Vice President for Alliances;  and also the film’s director, S.S. Rajamouli, and its producer, Shobu Yarlagadda. We convened at the Raleigh Studios Cafe in Hollywood prior to their AMD-sponsored screening of the international cut of Baahubali: The Beginning in Raleigh’s Charlie Chaplin theater.

When I put my question to Mr. Rajamouli, he replied that on a project of Baahubali’s scale, it was very important that he have the right technicians. In addition to having a superb multi-talented visual effects supervisor/artist/vfx producer in Srinivas Mohan and great concept artists at Makuta, he explained that the individuals assembled before me were no ordinary group of graphics technicians. Koduri, who happens to be Rajamouli’s cousin, is an engineering wizard who played an instrumental role in bringing the Retina Display to market during a prior stint at Apple, and who has also been a pioneer in the field of graphics processor units (GPUs), the specialized electronic circuits designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of video images. Draper, a transplanted Brit, founded his Hyderabad India-based studio 7 years ago with a major contribution from Rajamouli, and was a close technical collaborator with the director on his previous films Yamadonga, Magadheera, and Eega.

Rajamouli explained that the results his technical team delivered “seemed like a magic trick to me. The budget was very low, but the audience doesn’t care, the film still had to look great. I can’t run a subtitle on the screen with a disclaimer saying ‘We didn’t have enough money to do this right.’ We had to get great results. Our motto was ‘Achieve 90% of the quality of a Hollywood film for 20%