Inside Bollywood’s newest dream factory

With some help from Hollywood, a new, state-of-the-art studio in Film City, Goregaon, is hoping to bring some order, comfort and luxury in the way Bollywood shoots its movies. DNA takes a tour.

A sea of white enveloped in frenetic construction activity stands out amongst the fading colours of the Film City premises in Goregaon. It is the spot where, in a few days from now, the brand new Reliance MediaWorks Studios will throw its doors open for every kind indoor shoot, be it for feature films, television and game shows, TV commercials, musical performances, and maybe even weddings.

A brief guided tour inside the premises offers ample proof that this is not just another studio. It is without the usual fixtures that mark most Bollywood studios — no dirty, messy asbestos roofs, no exposed cables, no leaky floors, no feeling of entering an abandoned ruin, no maze of wires to trip on.

All this comes at a price, of course. Guesstimates say that the premium may be about 20-30% higher than, say, Yashraj Studios, which has for long held the reputation of being the most of state-of-the-art shooting facility in India.

But Reliance’s benchmark is Hollywood, having roped in Los Angeles-based Scott Carter of Wylie Carter and Associates, who has designed some of the newer stages of Disney Studios, Hollywood Centre Studios, and Raleigh Studios.

“Besides Bollywood’s big budget productions, getting Hollywood directors to come and shoot in this studio is going to be a major part of our strategy,” says Ashish Chakraborty, COO-operational services, Reliance MediaWorks Studios. “Typically, international film-makers come to India to shoot outdoors, but with this studio up and running, we’re sure that they’d liked to complete the indoor leg of their shoots in Mumbai as well.”

Spread over seven acres (roughly 2,00,000 sq ft), the studio has eight sound stages (shooting floors that are completely sync sound and do not allow the inflow of background noise). Step into one shooting floor and the temperature is low enough to tempt you to meditate. Maybe actors will rehearse their lines more easily at temperatures like these.

“We’ve designed the air conditioning in such a manner that even during the shoot, one need not switch off the ACs. At other studios, when you’re shooting in sync sound, you have to switch off the ACs when the camera starts rolling to prevent recording the noise they produce,” says Chakraborty.

Three of these shooting floors are ready for use, while the remaining are expected to be completed over the next six months.
Traditionally, its rare for a studio to have a hi-speed Wi-fi network within its premises. Raw footage shot in one schedule is transported to the post-production studio for processing. Reliance MediaWorks, however, has not only made the entire seven acres studio plot Wi-Fi enabled — using its own muscle in telecom — it has also installed Permanent Production Control Rooms (PCRs) that allow every production crew to connect with post production facilities in India and across the world, besides proxy access to major broadcasters and production houses. This will allow them to view rushes and rough cut edits directly from their premises.

“We want to be the end-to-end provider in the entertainment space. We’ve invested about Rs100 crore in building this studio. It doesn’t get better than this,” says Anil Arjun, CEO, Reliance MediaWorks.