Cinematographer Pankaj Kumar has built an enviable filmography — from the lithe brilliance of Ship of Theseus (2013), where the camera snaked into spaces narrower than a palm’s width and passed through doors, as though glass were air, to the wet fable-lands of Tumbbad (2018), the virgin landscapes of Rangoon (2017), and the smoggy and haunted violence of Delhi in Khauf (2025). He has also shot blockbusters — one of five cinematographers of Brahmastra (2022), the solo project Atrangi Re (2021), and now Ramayana, which he has shot with Mahesh Limaye.
What happens when a distinct voice shoots a monumentally mounted film? What does it take to make a tentpole film, whose budget has drawn as much, if not more, conversation than its craft?
“It was a lot,” Kumar tells THR India, calling the process a rewarding learning experience. "After doing this film, I think nothing is impossible in cinematic terms,” he adds, laughing.
Excerpts from an interview:
You said in an interview that this is the first time you spent so long on pre-and-post production; it was like making the same film three times. Can you talk me through the process?
The VFX team was involved right from the beginning. First, the concept art was presented to us by the production designers and concept artists. We would give our inputs, and after deliberation, the concept would be finalised.
Then, 3D artists would render it in a pre-visualisation software. Then, we would place the camera, decide on the shot breakdown and camera movements. I would do some lighting experiments, and finalise one scene, with that entire setup animated in 3D. That is how each and every scene was conceptualised and pre-visualised, before we arrived on the shoot.
Post-production, too, was a lengthy process. That is why I said that it was made three times — pre-production, shoot, and post production. I have never spent so much time on a desk being a part of any film. Generally, on a film, most of my time is spent on the field doing the camera angles and lighting. Here, I’ve done a maximum number of meetings, doing previews with VFX artists.
What were the timelines you were working with?
I joined in November 2023, and for at least one year it was just finalising the pre-visualisation of each and every scene. Then we started shooting, and even when we were shooting, this process of pre-visualisation and post-production was ongoing. The latter pretty much began the moment we started getting live footage, around mid-2024.
We kept shooting for at least two years, but there were long gaps, because some of the set pieces were too complicated, and some sequences needed multiple layers of motion-capture footage.
Whenever you see multiple crowds, lots of people fighting in the background, all that needs to be shot in layers on motion capture, especially the creatures. Then lots of stunts needed to be shot in layers.
Can you briefly talk about the difference between motion capture and shooting on a green screen — what was your involvement in both?
We use motion capture when we don’t have live actors — say, for characters like Kumbhakarna or Hanuman or the Asuras. You capture the performances of actors in body-hugging motion captured suits embedded with lots of sensors. There are about 42 infrared cameras. So every movement you do on that motion capture floor is captured in the 3D software, and those movements are superimposed on the 3D character that is generated.
Shooting on green screen is different—shooting with a live camera with proper lighting on your actor, with exact camera movement. My role was only limited to shooting the live-action, on the floor, with actors, because you don’t need a cinematographer for motion capture, because there is no actual lighting or camera placement done. The entire thing is captured by an array of 360 degree cameras in flat lighting. All the lighting and camera angles for these characters are done after you have placed them in the 3D environment.
Can we talk about two specific action scenes: the opening scene with Ravana raging through the army and sitting on top of them, and the final scene with Jatayu?
Both required a lot of planning. You cannot go in blind.
Is there space to improvise?
You can improvise finer aspects of the action on set. But on the whole, the beats need to be completely locked down — in that there is no flexibility. You need to know which action is being performed by which character.
Now, if you’re talking about the first sequence, Ravana enters and many people attack him at the same time. So all the people Ravana is interacting with all are shot live in the same layer. All the people who are fighting in the background were shot in separate layers at separate times and then composited later.
For the Jatayu sequence, we shot with the only two live actors — Yash and Sai Pallavi. Jatayu is entirely CG. There was a model of the bird, which was the exact size, painted in blue or sometimes green, just so that Yash would know exactly what the scale of this bird he is interacting with. But there was no animated bird, no actor acting out the bird onset.
The Pushpak Vimana was made in parts. There was also a miniature one for doing 3D capture. But for the action bits, we did not shoot with the entire Pushpak Vimana. We did it in fragments. So we knew in advance, what fragment should be built, and how much of it should be built. That is determined by our shot breakdowns in pre-visualisation.
I have a slightly philosophical question for you. You are known for films like Tumbbad and Rangoon and shows like Khauf, where there is this sense of place, a sense of a ‘Pankaj Kumar image’. In Ramayana, where the images are being rendered and re-rendered, where is your authorship as a cinematographer?
Nobody has asked me that question… For me, as a cinematographer, I have had the least amount of authorship on Ramayana, because it is a huge team working on the image. I am more of a technical person.
But also, it was only the complex action sequences which are completely locked. For the normal dramatic sequences, the emotional sequences, it was more flexible. We were deciding on set what angle works, and although there was a rough pre-visualisation, we went by our instinct. But, generally, the authorship for me as a cinematographer is much less in this film than I can claim in all my other films.
Can you talk about “world building”? What do you mean by that specifically?
For example, Ram’s world and Ravana’s world had to be visually distinct. Ram’s portions are bright and luminous, full of happiness. Ayodhya gets dark only when Ram is leaving for his exile. While Lanka’s visual brief was black and gold. I played around with lots of lights and shadows, giving a high contrast look. Those were the broad strokes.
Barring a few sequences, the entire film was shot indoors. So instead of relying on natural light, I had to create natural light for specific times of the day. If you ask any cinematographer, the most challenging aspect of lighting is to create natural sunlight, especially for a very large area, like a very big studio floor, because the sun is one single source of light. But when you are lighting up a large area, it becomes difficult to cover the entire area with the same intensity, with a single source of light. Then you start filling up the area with multiple sources, and it starts throwing multiple shadows, and that is a clear giveaway that it is artificially lit. So the biggest challenge was to create a single source of light that could cover a large area with enough intensity which would not throw multiple shadows.
There's some criticism about a frictionlessness quality in the image—where trees don’t look like trees and the sun doesn’t look like the sun. Can you respond to this? Is this a kind of image we have to get used to in a post-Marvel world?
No, absolutely not. You don’t have to get used to any one particular kind of image. You know from my own work how much I love natural light, natural environments, and when you are going for authentic storytelling based in the real world, there's nothing better than natural light for it.
The Marvel way of telling a story is one way of telling a story. It aims to give you spectacle, a roller coaster ride. There, the authenticity or the poetic beauty of the real world is less relevant than the thrill of that ride itself.
See, if we shot Ramayana in a real jungle, the world would look very real, but maybe that’s not what we’re looking for. We want our world to look more enhanced, better than the real forest. For the forests that Ram and Lakshman are walking in to fight demons, realistic trees in the jungle may not give us that larger-than-life experience, with giant monsters attacking and our characters swinging from one tree to the other. Where is realism in that? There is no realism in that. You are giving a fantasy world to the audience. So why be a stickler for realistic-looking leaves or branches? It’s just a different medium of expressing yourself.
Increasingly, more big-budget films are shot on green screens...
I hate green screens. As a cinematographer, I love shooting real environments. When I was shooting for Tumbbad, although there was a lot of VFX, I insisted to my VFX supervisor that I am not going to use green screens at all.
But for this film, we have some of the best VFX artists in the world, and they were very sure, from the beginning, that our green screens will not be perceptible like other films of today.
Are you off to shoot Ramayana Part 2 now?
We have already shot about 60 per cent of Part 2. A lot of VFX work, a lot of motion capture work is left because the second part is going to be more grand than the first part. It has lot more CG characters, like Hanuman and the whole vanar sena (the monkey army). A lot of more details need to be worked on!