Category: ACCOLADES

In early March, the VFX and animation industry in India was abuzz with anticipation as the FICCI BAF Awards approached.  With a wealth of amazing work recently completed by BOT and its partners, the company submitted work for awards consideration in two categories: Best Shot of the Year (International) and Best VFX in a Film (International).  BOT submitted work it had performed with Quebec-based partner Hybride on Solo: A Star Wars Story, and was thrilled to learn that the joint submissions were nominated in both categories.  

But an even bigger thrill came during the star-studded FICCI BAF Awards 2019 ceremony itself, held in Mumbai on March 13, 2019.  When the BOT / Hybride entry was announced as the winner for the Best VFX Shot of the Year – International category, a jubilant BOT team came up to the stage to accept the statue, with smiles plastered on their faces. Several key BOT team members graciously accepted the award on behalf of the larger team and Hybride, who could not be at the event. This is the second BAF Award win for BOT VFX, with numerous nominations over the years.

The BOT team was already vicariously basking in the afterglow following the 91st Academy Awards ceremony on February 24, 2019, where they were thrilled to have contributed VFX work towards 4 of the 5 films nominated for the Visual Effects Oscar:  Avengers: Infinity War, Christopher Robin, Ready Player One, and Solo: A Star Wars Story. Another Oscar-nominated film the company had the pleasure to work on was Mary Poppins Returns.  They reveled in the successes of Black Panther, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Green Book, amazing films nominated for Best Picture of 2019, also films BOT has contributed work to.  

“While bagging awards is always great, just being a part of the creation process for any amazing content is the ultimate reward,” says Zameer Hussain, BOT’s Creative Head.

The Best Animated Frames [BAF] Awards was started in 2004 by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry [FICCI] to recognize and honor students and professionals in the field of Animation. This first-ever Animation Awards in India grew over the years to encompass awards not only in Animation, but also in the VFX and Gaming fields. The contest now receives top-notch entries from across the globe. In fact, the last BAF Awards held in March 2018 received around 400 entries from across 12 countries.

Congratulations on the BOT TEAMWORK that led to winning the FICCI BAF Award!

Image Engine along with BOT VFX win this years Best VFX in a Motion Picture Award in the International Category for their work on CHAPPiE (2015)  at the FICCI FRAMES BAF Awards 2016. Its a moment to rejoice for BOTs as this recognition is yet another testament to the numerous hearts we have won over the years, doing what we love the most  – delivering great quality of work!

BOT Enables Robot’s Digital Existence in Chappie

As if to extend the plot line of the film into the real world, BOT (a.k.a. BOT VFX) provided supporting work that enabled the digital existence of Chappie the robot in Neill Blomkamp’s fascinating Sci-Fi flik.  In the film, Chappie, a robot equipped with newly developed AI programming, discovers his self-identity inspired by human traits.  So the irony was never lost on the BOT team that a creative crew of humans drew their inspiration (and their name) from the precision and efficiency of robots.

BOT provided supporting visual effects services for Image Engine, the venerable visual effects house in Vancouver that has become Neill’s go-to place for VFX for nearly all of his films. BOT also provided supporting work for Neill’s other film, Elysium, released last year.

“We’ve had a long standing relationship with Image Engine so when Shawn Walsh, their EP, asked us if we can provide care and love on some particularly tough paint work in an aggressive timeline, we told him there was no way we could say no to such a worthy robotic cause” says Hitesh Shah, BOT’s humanoid leader.

Neill wanted to avoid using motion capture techniques to ensure authenticity to the acting and interaction with real characters, so all of the shots with Chappie were acted out by an actor in grey marker-suit, and then the actor’s motions were hand animated onto a digital Chappie.  Of course this meant that for nearly 70 minutes of the film in which Chappie is in frame, the human stand-in actor had to be clean-plated out so that the digital version could cleanly take his place.

This is where BOT’s stellar paint team rose to the varied challenges of removing the actor completely from these shots.  To make the stand-in human Chappie completely disappear in these plates so that Image Engine’s team can cleanly place the CG Chappie was a monumental feat.  The more agonizing shots to get to look just right were the ones with close interactions between the human actors that were to stay on the plate and Chappie’s human stand-in.  The delicate art of generating a believable background in areas with large dynamic motion and lighting changes was akin to creating a small constellation of animated matte-paintings for the shot in just such a way that no one even questioned that something else existed there before.

Artists who slaved over these cleanplate shots have a bitter-sweet feeling watching it in the movie.  They were ecstatic to finally see it on the big screen, but sad that no one except the craftsmen would even know that something else was originally there in the plate shot on camera.  But as any good VFX artist knows, the ultimate complement that an audience can pay to a digital paint artist’s work is to say they didn’t see anything.

Looking at BOT’s role in supporting the digital existence of robots in Chappie, perhaps the old adage that “truth is stranger than fiction” should be updated to “truth in support of fiction is stranger than fiction”.