A visual effects (VFX) studio is a company whose artists make images on computers and combine them with filmed shots, for films and series. It builds digital creatures, crowds, explosions, floods and whole cities that were never filmed. Film studios and streaming services hire a VFX studio for a film or a series, usually at a fixed price. Some of the largest VFX studios in the world have most of their artists in India, in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai.
In VFX, a shot is a single unbroken piece of film, often only a few seconds long. A studio works on each shot in a chain of departments. Modelling artists build the creature or the building in 3D. Texture artists paint its surface. Riggers give it a skeleton that can move. Animators move it, frame by frame. FX simulation artists make the water, fire, smoke and dust. Lighting artists light the scene to match the real shoot. Finally, compositors combine the filmed picture and the computer-made layers into one final image. Turning a 3D scene into finished images is called rendering, and it can take hours of computer time for each frame.
Take, for example, a fantasy series for a streaming service, with a dragon in 300 shots. The studio studies the script and quotes a fixed price, say ₹12 crore, which is an average of ₹4 lakh for each shot. The work is planned shot by shot. The studio's pipeline software passes each shot from one department to the next and records every version. Every week, the series' VFX supervisor, the person who is responsible for the effects in the series, reviews the latest versions and sends notes. If the director changes a scene late, the studio must negotiate extra payment. Otherwise, the studio pays for the extra work out of its own earnings.
Why is so much of this work done in India? VFX is competitive, and each job earns the studio little. So the work tends to move where skilled artists cost less. India also has a large number of trained artists. The time difference helps too: work reviewed in Los Angeles in the evening can be fixed in India overnight.
A studio needs very large amounts of computing and storage. Every shot is stored as thousands of large image files, often in object storage. For a busy month, a studio may rent extra servers by the hour from a GPU cloud instead of buying them. Shots that were filmed on a virtual production stage often need less work later, because much of the background was already captured in the camera. Artists also use graphic design software to paint over images and remove unwanted objects. AI tools now do some of this clean-up, as described in AI-generated content.