'Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan are very hands-on in planning action sequences,' reveals YRF VFX head Sherry Bharda

Siddharth Anand’s Pathaan, which released during the Republic Day weekend in 2023, turned out to be one of the biggest blockbusters of all time. The biggest highlight of the movie was the action-packed sequence featuring Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan, which gave cinegoers an adrenaline rush.

Now, the VFX head of YRF, Sherry Bharda revealed what went while executing those sequences. “These sequences can’t be made in a linear fashion, they all have to be fairly interactive and inclusive, because where one person hands over to the other, it cannot be downstream, it all has to be planned before… These sequences usually need an alignment from all the creative stakeholders in the process. So Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, they are very savvy and hands on in this process. When the director shows them the pre-viz that we’ve done, which is almost like a small simplified version of the actual edit that they’ll see eventually, they have their ideas, they have their thoughts, they know what they’re supposed to do on set,” said Sherry to Variety.

She added, “The scale of it had to be even bigger than Pathaan, because now the audiences had seen and appreciated what had happened on the Tiger-Pathaan sequence there. But given the limited time, we used extensive 3D visualization. It means actually, on the computer, animating and putting into place every shot that is eventually going to be then shot on a live stage, so that you were making the sequence before you even went to shoot… And we knew if we didn’t do this we would be dead in the water because there was no time for that usual ‘fix it in post’ situation, it had to all be planned from the beginning. So this process called pre-visualization, which we do to a large extent on all action sequences, just so that we can have this planning down earlier, we did this at a much deeper in-depth level for this one particular sequence because of the limited time.”

Apart from Pathaan, we saw the duo in Tiger 3. The duo will next pair up for Tiger Vs Pathaan.