The 'Videogamification' of Movies | From 'Ramayana' to 'Jana Nayagan': How VFX, Gaming Tech and Flat Images Are Rewriting Indian Cinema

There is a totemic image in Mani Ratnam’s Iruvar (1997). Tamizhselvan (Prakash Raj) takes his friend, the newly minted superstar Anandan (Mohanlal) to the terrace to show him the bulging crowds of devoted fans thronging to meet him. Anandan is nervous. Tamizhselvan takes his tentative hands, to raise it and wave to the crowd. Cinematographer Santosh Sivan’s camera, too, rises with the locked hands and looks down — the vertigo of height and the viscosity of a crowd. Are these no longer virtues in cinema? 

Increasingly, with the rise of action films shot inside studios, with heavy VFX, and increasingly, even AI, the images are getting flatter, what cinematographer Ravi Varman called “plastic”. Height does not feel like height. Crowds do not feel like crowds. Sunlight doesn’t feel like sunlight. 

Take the recently released trailer of Ramayana where the VFX-generated visual of crowds at the feet of Ravana (Yash) is uninterested in evoking either the vertigo or the viscosity. Ants are crawling in matchbox cities. This is a conscious choice. It is not that the film, with a reported budget somewhere between ₹1900-4500 crores, could not muster the resources for a stadium crowd; it is that it considers it (the effort) irrelevant to its storytelling. 

This "videogamification" of movies is not coming out of nowhere. In a 2023 interview with Film Companion, Jigesh Gajjar, head of VFX and DNEG, noted, “The pandemic helped us tie up the visual effects industry with the video game industry. We work very closely with Unreal, which is the backend of the gaming engine, which is what is used across Playstation, Xbox, etc.” Gaming is in the DNA of the new visual age.

To look at the effect of the pandemic, the aesthetic difference between War (2019) and War 2 (2025) is instructive. The former, released before the pandemic, moved between seven countries and fifteen cities from Portugal to Kerala to the Arctic Circle — the first Indian film to be shot there. The desire to bring the world into the film was more palpable. 

“The first War had different location work than War 2,” Benjamin Jasper, the cinematographer of both films tells THR India, “but War was also a lot simpler — a car chase or a bike case. Characters were not on jets or on top of moving trains or planes. Logistically, it then gets more complicated to shoot people in physical locations safely.” Jasper also notes the pandemic as a cleaving moment. “Post-COVID, there were a lot of VFX-heavy blue screen films that did well at the box office in Bollywood. There was a different appetite,” he notes. 

Jasper and the makers “leaned into” that appetite, “because there was an expectation of suspension of disbelief from the audience. Though, unfortunately, I know the audience pushed back on the colour grade.”

One of the consistent critiques of the film was its rank indifference to the natural world — the physics of the action and the vividness of real life. A Japanese monastery was constructed in YRF Studios in Andheri, with a VFX wolf.

The increasing use of blue screen or green screen might be attributed to the exploded scale of storytelling — you could not possibly expect people to shoot action scenes atop a plane or a landing a revving car onto a moving train given the budgets and timelines. But the fact that writers are more willing to pen such scenes, knowing fully well their words will rest on synthetic visuals is just as telling.

The logistics of shooting under the new regime of images also shifted. “You can cut costs on having everybody in one room, locked in. We shot Mowgli (2018) in 89 days. Even with Ramayana we are looking at a very small truncated schedule, so we are saving everybody’s time, and we have enough time to visually enhance the movie,” Gajjar noted.

As a result, we are getting films shot in closed, protected environments, where even a small ritual fire is VFX-generated. The presence of the world and its elements — wind, fire, water, land, not to mention the distinct visual cultures of new lands, the way the sun falls differently in different cities — has been vacuumed out of this sealed universe. 

The recently released Jana Nayagan, starring Vijay, where even an African civil war was shot in a set erected in Tamil Nadu, is another example. “For wind, fire, height, etc. we calculate and shoot. But when you are working with actors on a set, we sometimes avoid it — thinking we can add it later, in post-production,” Sathyan Sooryan, the cinematographer of Jana Nayagan tells THR India. 

Jana Nayagan also faced the typical constraints of shooting a tech-war film— robots, for example — but also, being the last film of superstar, and now Chief Minister, Vijay, it was impossible to shoot in public spaces without the fear of turning swarms into stampedes.

Shooting with green screens, however, brings with it its own set of challenges. The background plates used to overlay the image need to be shot at the same height, angle, with the same lens and focal length in order for the final image to be rendered realistically. The desire to cut costs and the high number of background plates makes the production bunch heights and focal lengths together.

With green screens, cinematographers also have to be careful. There is, according to Sooryan, “a restriction of movement, because with every angle change, the VFX will be affected—more work, more budget, more care, more man-hours. So we keep things static, pan lighter. We have to shoot based on how much VFX the scene needs.”

Besides, in these VFX-heavy films, “lighting has to be neutral so it is easier to replace backgrounds,” the YouTuber and filmmaker Luke Riether notes in his video Why Movies Look Flat Now. Additionally, when the background is usually blurred out, or fixed in post, it is immediately apparent — elements of crowds, or hills, or building facades. Suspension of disbelief is not a renunciation of belief. We still want a world we recognise in our movies. This might be why these films feel stiffer. 

Jana Nayagan was also racing against time. The film’s shoot was completed by June-July 2025 and the VFX — working with ten companies — was to be completed by December of the same year, in time for Pongal release in January 2026. “We needed at least a year. Because whether it is a set extension or creating a whole set, VFX was there throughout the film,” Sooryan notes.

This narrow window is a systemic issue in the industry. Cinematographer Ravi Varman, who has worked on films like Ponniyin Selvan (2022-23), Indian 2 (2024), and Love Insurance Kompany (2026), notes, “Hollywood productions like Avatar (2009-2025) and Life of Pi (2012) typically allocate a much longer post-production window, allowing for refinement. In India, I’ve worked on films where the final VFX shots were delivered only days before release.”

What is this refinement? Varman gives an example of working on Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s face for Ponniyin Selvan, “While de-ageing her, we researched how she looked 15 years ago by studying films like Raavan (2010), Jeans (1998), and Taal (1999). We examined changes in her jawline, forehead, and skin texture, and built that understanding into the de-ageing process. I spent more than five months purely on research and development before the actual work.”

The synthetic look and roughshod, last minute VFX might be reasons for the flat images we see coming out of Indian cinema, especially the action-film genre. Sooryan has another theory. “The flatness you feel might also come from the clarity of the image. Because of its sharpness, where everything is crystal clean, people sometimes de-sharpen their image,” he notes. Over the decades the big lights — halogens, fresnel, and tungsten — have given way to LED, which gives a consistency in the image. Some directors like Christopher Nolan, though, still use tungsten to achieve the warm, high-contrast look.

Besides, even the quality of both the lenses and projection has vastly improved — a clarity that puts realism into a deeper quandary. You can see, with increased visibility, all the things that go into the making and unmaking of an image.

A shift in the verbiage around films is underfoot. The fact that Ramayana puts DNEG at the very outset of its teaser and trailer, a first for any film, almost gloating its synthetic roots is telling. “Over the last decade, I also feel we’ve increasingly begun describing films by the scale of their budgets rather than the strength of their imagery,” Varman notes.

It is, after all, a new regime of images — and to every regime, its own rule of law.