Ang Lee’s Life of Pi roared at the 85th Acamdey Awards as it took home awards for best original score, cinematography, visual effects and best direction.
While the movie has strong Indian connection; with the movie beginning from Pondicherry and the lead characters being all Indians, the win at the Oscars had overwhelming response from different pockets of the city.
But the main applause came from the office of the Moving Picture Company (MPC) at ITPL Business Park on Whitefield Road.
MPC is a post-production facility creating digital visual effects and computer animation for feature films, commercials, music videos and television, and its Bangalore office had given a major contribution to the visual effects of the movie.
“Feel very good, proud, extremely delighted with the team’s achievements,” said Akhauri R Sinha, managing director, MPC, Bangalore.
It was Guillaume Rocheron, the MPC’s VFX Supervisor on Life of Pi who led the teams across London, Vancouver and Bangalore.
“He was on stage to receive the Oscar statuette, along with his fellow nominees Bill Westenhofer, Erik-Jan de Boer and Donald R Elliott. Guillaume Rocheron said on the night, ‘I am extremely proud to receive this Academy Award for Life of Pi, as it represents a fantastic achievement for the hundreds of artists working at MPC’,” an elated Akhauri said.
He added. “Around 100 people from MPC Bangalore worked on Life of Pi. Out of the 120 shots, the actual scope for MPC Bangalore was to work for the storm sequences and the sequence where the ship is leaving India and gets into the way of the storm. We also worked for the movie, Prometheus, which was also nominated and it is an overwhelming feeling for us as a team,”
The team in Bangalore is over 250 strong, and apart from Life of Pi and Prometheus, has worked on many acclaimed films which have won accolades from across the world. These include Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Parts 1 & 2 (Both Part 1 and Part 2 received Academy Award nominations for Best Visual Effects in successive years, 2011 and 2012; Part 2 won the BAFTA for Special Visual Effects in 2012), X-Men: First Class, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Sherlock Holmes 2, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , Robin Hood, Sucker Punch, Sunshine, Watchmen, Skyfall and more.