Autodesk Customer Success Story Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd.

COMPANY

Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd.LOCATIONMumbai, Maharashtra

SOFTWAREAutodesk ® Flame PremiumProduct ® Luster

“Working on promos, calls for a tool that gives you room for creativity on a canvas that is powered by a turbo motor, as you are constantly get-ting ideas and have to execute them quickly to see if they work or not. Flame is just the versatile solution for that”

— Joginder Singh VarnaSenior Flame Artist, MTV

Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd.

Flametastic promos on fantastic timelinesViacom18 leverages the power of Autodesk Flame Premium to create stylish promos

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Bandook Music Video - Image courtesy of MTV India

Promos, the cleverly packaged enticing video tit bits of a show, stitched together in chic and a pacey manner, are the first to grab viewers’ attention. A very critical component in promoting a show, they need to have a unique treatment and rendition, to stand out in the clutter.

Can something make this already demanding task even more challenging? Yes, if you work for a brand like MTV that has a legacy of dolling out slick, stylish and super creative content day in day out, the benchmark is just too high. When you have such a tall order to follow and have to inno-vate on a daily basis, you need a tool that allows you to efficiently give form to your ideas, that too at a lightning speed and Autodesk Flame and Au-todesk Lustre absolutely fit this bill feels Joginder Singh Varna- Senior Flame Artist, MTV. No won-der two Flame Premium setups at Viacom18 are buzzing with work at all hours of the day.

The Promo team at Viacom18 handles a variety of content starting from music concerts/ festivals to reality shows to travel shows to music videos and so on. “We never know what kind of show or brief is coming our way, and in a situation like this, a tool that gives you the ability to move fast and start cracking becomes key. Also, Flame fully supports 4K and Ultra HD throughout the creative process and this is essential as we shoot all our

stuff in HD on Red, Red Dragon or Alexa,” says Joginder.

The Promo ProcessBeing a part of the Promo team, Joginder is involved in a project from the very beginning guiding the team on what kind of shots need to be taken for a given spot. But once the shots land on his timeline, it is a blank canvas for him to go crazy with ideas. “If you have the right treatment and style in mind, you can completely transform the footage that you started with to something extraordinary. You should know what you want to achieve and Autodesk Flame has multiple ways to get it done.” Taking an example of MTV’s most popular show with cult following, Roadies, he shows us the work done for its recent show packaging and the before and afters are worlds apart. For this one, he has taken rushes from the show footage and graded it on Lustre to add that dangerous and dark vibe to it that Roadies is widely known for. After some red and black hues have been expertly embellished all over, the shots are back in Flame for FX. A lot of 3D elements like CG chopper mo-torcycle wheels , birds etc and some natural

Autodesk Customer Success Story Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd.

elements like rain and fire are added, and after some expert additions here and there, and viola! the spot for the Roadies Season 12 is ready to go. “Previously, these 3D elements needed to be creat-ed in Autodesk Maya and then imported in Flame but with 2016 edition these can be done within the tool.” he adds. And the work is not limited to just video, you can create some convincing promos with stills too. To execute the Roadies promo, Joginder picked still

images from the raw footage and added camera movements, flying particles, 3D Supers to it. “I added multiple layers, created a Z Depth, and once you have that, you can get any kind of motion, any kind of angular movement, which makes the element look 3D. This is basically ‘2D in 3D space’ which we mostly use.”

FLAME 2016 – What’s New? The expectation of audiences and content

You should know what you want to achieve and Autodesk Flame has multiple ways to get it done

Before After

Roadies Season 12 Show Packaging - Image courtesy of MTV India

Roadies Season 12 Show Packaging - Image courtesy of MTV India

producers are changing, people are exposed to a lot of cutting edge FX and packaging in the stuff they see on TV and in films, and they expect the same kind of finish in everything else. “It is a good thing that the tools that we use are also evolving to help us deliver to these evolving needs. The latest edition of Flame packs many such features”, Joginder adds.

Flame 2016 comes with many in built features like Matchbox, Glow, Edge Detect, Rays, Blooming, Automize, Blurs that were only available through third-party plugins earlier.

“The newly introduced Replica feature helps one generate multiple copies of a single element. This node is best used if you want to explode a particle system. Compliment-ing 3D tracking feature in Flame is now ‘Planar tracking’, which allows you to track individual elements with each layer. Most importantly with the 3D Shapes features our dependency on the media team for 3D assets has significantly gone down, we manage to create a lot of stuff with the tool itself.”

Autodesk Customer Success Story Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd.

Bandook Music Video - Image courtesy of MTV India

A 24/7 channel has all kinds of requirements from the real quick ones to the really creative ones. “When one of those ‘needs to be delivered in a jiffy’ requirements come in, Flame allows you to quickly do changes, do a little bit of paint work, edits, roto, tracking, add animation put it all to-gether and get it out in record time.”

“Working on promos, calls for a tool that gives you room for creativity on a canvas that is powered by a turbo motor, as you are constantly getting ideas and have to execute them quickly to see if they work or not.”

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Before After

“We never know what kind of show or brief is coming our way, and in a situation like this, a tool that gives you the ability to move fast and start cracking becomes key.”

— Joginder Singh VarnaSenior Flame Artist, MTV

Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd.

“The speed at which you can work on multiple shots, in parallel, play them down, make different versions is very critical in a creative iterative pro-cess. Autodesk Flame is just the versatile solution for that,” concludes the Global Flame Artist of the year Award Nominee for 2015.

Image courtesy of MTV India