PUNE, INDIA: Romeo and Laila had more heroes behind the camera than Saif Ali Khan or Kareena Kapoor. One was sitting in Pune and working to make India's babysteps into the CG world quite a leap.

The movie ‘Roadside Romeo’, which was a first and joint effort towards a complete animation flick by Yash Raj Films with Walt Disney, used supercomputer Eka's skills to a great extent.

It's probably the first time a work of this stature and nature for a full-length animated movie was attempted in India with Eka, the country’s supercomputing hero. With Eka, a scientific feat by CRL (Computational Research Labs), a Tata Sons' wholly owned subsidiary, that achieved the fourth rank globally and first in Asia in supercomputing's top league, the producers managed to brig down the production time to one fourth of a time otherwise taken to make an animation film.

"Animation involves a lot of mathematical calculation between drawings and the final images. The morphing and rendering entails a lot of compute power,” says N Seetha Rama Krishna, project manager, CRL and one of the key captains of the Eka mission.

“Scene by scene it is a computer-intense job, which, on normal computer would take a year's time and that too with less quality. Supercomputer has set a new bar in animation with high quality levels made possible through a deeper rendering. Not all of Eka was used in this movie but about one-third was used."

‘Roadside Romeo’ has been reported to be in the $7 million range, which is far less than that of an average Pixar feature.

There are about 25 frames to be dealt per second and that asks for two to six hours per frame in conventional production methods.

Added to that is the complexity and re-rendering needs. Supercomputers come to play a new role thus in animated movies. In India, CG or Computer Generated movies have been attempted before by Pentamedia projects like ‘Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists’ and ‘Pandavas: The Five Warriors’. Initially, the idea of computers in full-feature length animated movies was debated on grounds of richness of images but, of late, computer-generated films have set a new hit.

Two of the 10 highest-grossing films in history are animated features released within the past three years. Films like ‘Antz’, ‘Happy Feet’, ‘Monsters Inc’, ‘Ratatouille’, ‘Shark Tale’ and ‘Toy Story’ have set new bench marks already.

Leaders in this area like DreamWorks Animation have been working on deployment of large-scale compute clusters used to render the more than 100,000 frames in a feature film and with several films in production in the pipeline at any given time, come forth enormous computational requirements.

Normally, it's in the second half of production when HPC (High Performance Computing) becomes significant. DreamWorks has two distinct clusters, one in Glendale in Southern California and one in Redwood City in Northern California.

Its recent projects include hits like Shrek 2, Shark Tale, Over the Hedge and Flushed Away. One of DreamWorks’ recent films required 12 million CPU-hours.

Computers would no longer have a cameo role in animated movies, for sure. As Krishna himself confesses, there's more possible and under progress on projects like these that Eka itself is capable of. Lights Click Action.