EXCLUSIVE: India’s record-breaking Baahubali universe is expanding, and they’re joining forces with a familiar collaborator. Baahubali: The Eternal War, a new animated film based on the franchise, is using the A&M MoCap Lab at Hyderabad’s Annapurna Studios for previsualisation of its most complex sequences, marking a new chapter for both the IP and for a storied Indian studio facility.
What The A&M Motion Capture Lab Does
The A&M MoCap Lab was announced in February this year, as a joint venture between Nagarjuna Akkineni’s Annapurna Studios, Baahubali producer Shobu Yarlagadda’s Mihira Visual Labs and Hollywood technology partner Animatrik Film Design.
The facility was inaugurated by SS Rajamouli (director of the original film) in February, during which he confirmed that key sequences of his upcoming film Varanasi had already been shot there. “India has always had some of the world’s best technicians contributing to major global productions, but what we lacked was an advanced facility right here at home,” Rajamouli, who’s had a longstanding association with the studios, said at the inauguration.
“When I look back at some of my previous films like Baahubali and Eega, I reminisce how I could have made them even better if I had access to motion capture technology back then in India. I have visited several motion capture facilities across the world, but what A&M offers is a perfect blend of precision and performance. We utilised this facility for crucial sequences in Varanasi, and the results were simply fantastic.”
Over the years, India’s blockbusters have sought to outdo each other in budget, especially those in Bollywood and the Telugu film industry. After Kalki 2898 AD and the upcoming Ramayana adaptation, Varanasi, starring Mahesh Babu, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Prithviraj Sukumaran, is vying for the title of India’s most expensive film ever, with a reported ₹1,400 crore budget (approx $147 million). It is also the project from which several sequences were shot at this lab.
The Studio Behind The Technology
Annapurna Studios (not to be confused with the Megan Ellison-founded Annapurna Pictures in Hollywood) has been a cornerstone of Indian cinema for half a century. The studio was founded by the late actor Akkineni Nageswara Rao, who made the decision to relocate the Telugu film industry from Chennai to Hyderabad at a time when the land was, according to my conversation with his grandson Naga Chaitanya Akkineni, “completely full of rocks, no access roads, no familiarity of people or any kind of infrastructure around.”
Annapurna produced over 60 films since its inception and today operates across a 22-acre campus with 12 fully equipped studio floors, a Manduva House, and a Glass House used for shoots and film pooja ceremonies.
The studio’s journey from film production house to post-production powerhouse has been incremental but also deliberate. Colour grading came first, then visual effects, then audio. The Dolby Atmos Premier Mix Studio, the first of its kind in India at that level, established Annapurna’s reputation for investing beyond what the immediate market would recover. “We spent around 1:3x to get that Dolby Atmos premier mix facility,” C.V. Rao, CTO of Annapurna Studios tells me. The logic, as Naga Chaitanya explained, was not about short-term returns. “When a filmmaker is coming to finalize his art, how can he look at it on a small screen? He needs to experience whatever he’s done in a theater-like screen as how the audience is going to experience it.”
What The A&M MoCap Lab Is
The facility occupies a 10,000 square foot climate-controlled motion capture sound stage, with a capture volume of 60 feet by 40 feet by 30 feet. The camera setup comprises 54 Vicon Valkyrie cameras and 10 Vicon Vero cameras (all Vicon motion capture cameras) and the stage supports up to 20 performers simultaneously. The latter, they tell me, is beyond the usual capacity of comparable facilities elsewhere in India. “There are facilities in India but they are only limited to three, four, five characters maximum. They cannot go beyond that,” says Rao.
Animatrik’s own credits include Avengers: Endgame, Shogun, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and RRR, the last of which did part of its post-production at Annapurna Studios.
Brett Ineson, president and CTO of Animatrik Film Design, said of the partnership at the inauguration, “Annapurna has long been a beacon of cinematic excellence, and partnering with them and Mihira Visual Labs to bring world-class performance capture capabilities to India is truly exciting. This collaboration represents a step in enabling filmmakers and creators to tell more immersive, emotionally rich stories with the highest global standards.”
For veteran actor and co-owner Nagarjuna Akkineni, the facility closes a long-existing gap. “For decades, Indian filmmakers have aspired to tell large-scale stories that match global standards, but access to high-end technology was often a limitation,” he said at the inauguration. “With A&M, filmmakers can now bring everything from epic adventures to intricate science fiction dramas to life right here in Hyderabad.”
The Facility’s International Reach And Current Projects
The A&M MoCap Lab has already conducted two Hollywood productions remotely, both for the gaming industry, the details of which Annapurna did not disclose in our interview. The projects involved crew members from 60 different countries participating online while Annapurna’s performers and technicians operated the stage in Hyderabad.
Additional Telugu productions and Indian animation films are in line to use the facility. Director Ashwin Kumar, whose animated film Mahavatar Narasimha released last year, visited the facility after being dissatisfied with every other motion capture option in India. “The moment we opened this facility, he came and he saw, and he did one demo — he brought a small script and we shot and he was really happy,” Rao tells me. Kumar’s next film will use the A&M MoCap Lab. Annapurna currently has five films and one web series on the floor, keeping in line with Chaitanya’s statement that the studio is “getting back into film production very aggressively.”
The Baahubali Animated Film
Baahubali: The Eternal War is a completely animated film, though not in a conventional sense. They tell me the visual style is being modelled on Arcane, Netflix’s acclaimed League of Legends adaptation, a style that is neither conventional 2D animation nor straightforward anime but a textured, cinematic hybrid. The motion capture stage is being used for previsualisation of dance sequences and action choreography, with director Ishan Shukla using captured data as reference material for the animators.
“Motion capture has already shook hands with AI, ” says Nagarjuna, who was on set during the Baahubali :The Eternal War sessions. “People were doing classical dance and martial arts and right in real time, the AI was making a real person do it. I wore the whole suit — you could see I was doing martial arts. So it’s already there. It’s already merged.”
A promotional teaser for Baahubali : The Eternal War has already been released. A release date has not been confirmed.