E&M team celebrates VFX award victory

Saturday, 16 November 2013 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Text and pix by Sarah Hannan Meeting people in the film industry is always exciting. I was privileged to be invited to join Boodee Keerthisena and his team at Elephant and the

Mouse Inc. (E&M) to celebrate the victory of being awarded the first VFX award at the Derana-Lux Film Awards held this year. Speaking about the visual effects company Boodee said: “Elephant and the Mouse was established in 2006. Since then we have done many TV commercials, feature films, music videos, local and foreign corporate videos and TV series. “Through the years of hard work enabled E&M to earn recognition as Sri Lanka’s largest and one of the leading Visual Effects (VFX) companies in the industry. As the founder of the company I established E&M in order to do create my own fantasy, science fiction and action thriller movies.” The film ‘Maathaa’ directed by Boodee that won the award, included over 350 VFX shots. VFX (Visual Effects) and CG (Computer Graphics) are used in films to create whimsical sceneries, war environments, bomb blasts, aircraft blasts etc. There are many international production houses that are dedicated to creating these animated frames for films. The talented set of individuals at E&M are knowledgeable enough to work on film sets and use their tech wizardry to create these scenes. Just like many Hollywood films, Maathaa also contained VFX shots which included 3D shots, compositions, invisible VFX shots such as erasing unwanted objects or people from shots, computer generated images, shot enhancing, crowd multiplying explosions, and many more visually altered or created shots. “It’s all hard works of the boys and girls of E&M. It took just over six months to put the entire VFX shots together and among them some of the major computer generated scenes including the bomb explosion of the train scene was designed and edited by the E&M team,” Boodee explained. E&M team works with Maya and 3D Max platforms mainly. After the movie ‘Maathaa’, they also did the VFX for ‘Kusa Paba’ last year’s biggest blockbuster in Sri Lanka directed by Dr. Sunil Ariyaratne. Since then, E&M has been doing VFX for ‘Nimnayaka Hudakalawa’, and ‘Adventures of Ricky Deen’ both which were directed by Boodee. Launch of E&M School of Visual Effects After winning the best Visual Effects Award, Boodee and the team at E&M decided to offer a limited number of students full two-year scholarships. The scholarships will be available to students to apply before 1 January 2014. The uniqueness of the E&M School of VFX is that, they offer coursed tailor made to the needs of the students, who are armatures, or professionals who wants to fine tune their knowledge. The courses are from anywhere from three months to two years. Every full time student gets to work with industry professionals on their professional feature films. By doing that E&M wants to help created a better future for the state of the art Visual Effects industry in this part of the world. People who are interested to learn and train with us can log on to www.elephantandthemouse.com and apply on line. “Once we receive their application, we give them an opportunity to walk into our studios and have a tour at our E&M studios. They will be given the chance to discuss their course modules with our instructors at the school,” stated Boodee.