Not wanting to just be an outsourcing partner, ZMI insisted that they co-produce an India based animation adventure feature film for the world audience.
Many scripts were looked at, but none met their approval. They were looking for a modern day Jungle Book, but for a universal audience with more action and adventure.
On an impulse, Roy called the Ad Guru Alyque Balsara and asked him if he knew any good young scriptwriter who could write an animated adventure script.
The very next day a scruffy looking teenager knocked on Roy’s cabin. Wayne D’Souza was twenty-six, but looked eighteen.
Maybe it was the way he dressed … torn jeans, Hard Rock Café tee shirt, denim sling bag and long hair tied into a ponytail, which gave him college boy look.
For an hour Wayne listened to Roy, jotting down points on a piece of paper which looked
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like tissue paper he had picked up from the ZMI reception.
After he had heard him out, the boy took his leave and left. Roy was not at all impressed with him.
“He did not ask a single question!” He told Chika that evening. “I wonder what Alyque was smoking when he decided to send that twerp to meet us on such an important project.”
Exactly 10 days later, Roy received a call from Wayne asking for an appointment to present his idea. The ‘twerp’ also insisted that the whole decision making team be present at the meeting.
As luck would have it, Steven Phillips, the CEO of DreamToons Inc., was to visit ZMI the coming week to sign some papers.
“Should we ask the twerp to make the presentation in front of Steven?” Roy was a little apprehensive.
“Relax, Roy…” laughed Chika, “You are getting old and cranky. This young generation may dress like hippies, but they are actually yuppies!”
Roy nodded. But he still called Wayne and told him that he will be making the presentation to not just the ZMI team but also to the CEO of DreamToons.
On the day of the presentation, Wayne arrived with a smart looking girl. He was dressed better, though not well enough for Roy’s taste.
The jeans was unwashed but not torn, the Hard Rock Cafe tee shirt made way for a Che Guevara print black tee and to make things formal he had worn a cotton khaki jacket over it.
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Wayne started with the classic definition of
“Repositioning”.
“To most of the western world, India still is a country of snake charmers. We will take that position that exists in the minds of the people and slowly reposition what India really is.”
“The film will have dramatic start. A dense forest, lit by the pale moon light. Suddenly you hear heavy breathing and rustling. It is a small girl running scared. As she runs, she trips and falls. You show the close up of her animated face. Her large brown eyes stricken with fear as she backs into a huge tree. She is still, but you can hear some rustling. Her eyes transfixed on what is in front of her. Suddenly, you see the head of albino king cobra with its huge hood opened menacingly. And then in slow motion, another even more menacing head appears. It is a two-headed, albino king cobra.”
“Cut to a young blonde woman, waking up startled. It is Susan Holt, a young 22 year old rookie cop with NYPD. It was a recurring nightmare that she’s been having!”
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Wayne went on to narrate the whole story of how she comes to India to fulfil her karma and lands up in the dense forest of Sambhalpur.
An area that is terrorized by the notorious dacoit, Ranga. Ranga is tracked by the forest officer Rathod, whose ten your old daughter Tulli was tortured and killed by Ranga the very day Susan was born.
Then he went on to the dramatic climax in which Susan kills Ranga.
The narration lasted an hour and there was pin drop silence after Wayne dramatically narrated the climax.
After a minute Steven asked “Do we need a two headed albino snake? Isn’t it a bit too farfetched??”
Wayne smiled “When I wrote about the two headed albino king cobra, it was a figment of my over-ripe imagination. But when I did a bit of internet research, I found this!”
He dug out a print out of a newspaper article from his satchel. It had a photograph of a two headed, albino snake and the headline screamed
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“FOR SALE: Two Headed Albino Snake for $150,000” And went on to say that the amazing snake was available at the World Aquarium at St. Louis, USA.
“Wow!” said Steven. Have you thought of a name for the film?”
“THE LEGEND OF VEMPALLA,” replied Wayne, “Vempalla is an Indian name for an albino cobra. And it sounds really menacing.”
“Okay, we’ll do it,” said Steven, “but I want to make one change…”
“We will not do it in regular 2D animation; the Legend of Vempalla shall be the first 3D Animation Feature Film in the world!”
The interior designing and execution work for ZMI-DreamToons Studio as well as the new ZMI office in the new techno-park in New Bombay, as it usually happens, got delayed by a month. It was June end and the rains had set in.
In the third week of July, there was a dry spell and ZMI decided to move into the new office. The recruitment for the ZMI-DreamToons Studio was also completed and August 15, the Indian Independence Day was the chosen day of start of operations.
Meanwhile Wayne had collaborated with Mark Eisenberg, one of Hollywood’s top-notch screen writers to complete the script and screenplay of The Legend of Vempalla. The DreamToons’ casting team had then finalized the voices for each character.
A photo session was done with the cast and different expressions of each voice artist caught on camera.
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The animation team was given the photos so that they could tie up the expressions with the characters. The original sketches of each character was illustrated and digitized by DreamToons’ top animators in Hollywood.
For the first time in three decades, luck was on their side. For just a week after they shifted lock, stock and barrel to their new office, on 26th July 2005, Mumbai saw nature and human apathy combine to wreak havoc in the city.
The day started as a cloudy regular monsoon day and all of Mumbai went to work as usual and since there was no warning from the Met department, all schools were also on.
The rain started intensifying after noon and in the 12 hour period since, Suburban Mumbai was lashed with over 700 mm of rain. By 2:30 pm, the tracks were flooded and local trains ground to a halt, stranding millions of office goers. But rain showed no signs of letting up and it just kept on getting worse for the people who had left their offices and trying to get home by road.
At around 3:30 pm, high tide prevailed and the storm water gates to the Arabian Sea were
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closed. With no outlet and drainages clogged with plastic bags and other non-biodegradable garbage, the roads started flooding alarmingly.
Cars were swept away as over 10 feet of water flooded some parts. People abandoned their vehicles and scrambled to multi-storied buildings to save their lives.
To make matters worse, the flooding caused large scale short circuits and electricity to the entire city had to be shut down. With cell phone batteries dying, people could not get in touch with their loved ones at home.
Manholes on the roads were kept open by over smart locals, but when the water level increased and the drainage stopped, they turned out to be the biggest danger for pedestrians trying to wade their way to safety.
Most schools, fortunately, kept the children safe in the schools and let them off only after the floods receded.
People in nearby buildings chipped in food to keep the kids going once the cafeteria supplies were exhausted.
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Over 5000 people were killed that day in Mumbai and adjoining areas and many more were reported missing.
Roy and Rita had gone shopping to South Bombay that morning and after crawling in 3 feet water
to Santacruz, they had to abandon their SUV and take refuge in the higher floor of an apartment complex.
Luckily before her battery died down, Rita called Zasha’s school and they assured her that all the children are being taken care of and will be released to their respective parents or relatives only after the flood recedes.
ZMI’s erstwhile office in Chembur was completely flooded. Fortunately, they had shifted out of danger’s way, just a week back.
ZMI-DreamToons Studio commenced operation as scheduled on 15 August with great media hype.
The very next week they were subjected to a massive income tax raid.
Teams of five officers each rang the doorbell of the residences of Chika, Roy and Ballu at dawn. Their phones were disengaged and nobody was allowed to go out.
For three hours they checked their homes and seized some documents that they thought were pertinent. Most of the cash found in their homes were accounted for. They took details of their bank accounts and the lockers that they held. The lockers were searched and the contents tabulated and noted.
Then they accompanied them to their new office. There was already a team of ten officers at the office rummaging through the files and going through the accounts department’s computer.
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Roy, Chika and Ballu were grilled in their cabins by the Deputy Collector of Income Tax, Mr A. K. Varma.
At 8:00 pm that evening the raid ended. The team confiscated some documents and files and gave a whole list of documents to submit within the next week.
The story might have been different if Chika hadn’t received a call from one of his moles in the Income Tax office a day prior, warning him of the impending raid.
The IT department’s intelligence was right, because of the unreasonably high tax structure, there were a lot of cash transactions in the ZMI- DreamToons JV that were unaccounted for.
But 24 hours was enough notice to clean up their act and stash the cash and incriminating documents at a safe place.
The ordeal was not over. When the phones were switched on, Chika realized that he had more than hundred missed calls from his mother.
“Where were you all day?” she screamed when he called her back. “Your dad has suffered a
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massive heart attack and has been admitted in the ICCU at St. Mary’s.”
Immediately Chika and Roy rushed to St. Mary’s. They first met Dr Shrivastav and then the Cardiac Specialist.
“He has suffered an extremely massive attack. The fact that he is diabetic has made things worse. We are doing our best, but it doesn’t look good,” the doctor explained.
Daya Anna passed away peacefully that night leaving behind two wives, two married daughters from his legitimate wife and Chika.
Both his son-in-laws were restaurateurs and lusting over Daya Anna’s various properties and investments.
After the funeral, they met at his father’s apartment. Though the son-in-laws were sceptical, Chika, being the eldest, presided over matters.
He divided the properties into equal parts and gave it to his step sisters, the sprawling apartment they lived in and the cash in bank were given to his step mom. Only the bar and
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restaurant which originally belonged to Rani’s father was given to his mother, while he kept nothing for himself.
The son-in-laws were happy with the settlement but Rani was aghast that Chika did not keep anything for himself.
“You should have at least kept the bar and banquet hall named after you!” She scolded him.
“Mom…” Chika replied, “He has given me a name. That means more than anything else to me. As for the money, I don’t need an inheritance; I have made my own fortune.”
Back in ZMI, the Income Tax scrutiny was scuttled and settled by sending Rs 10 lakh in cash to Varma. Though the department did not have anything concrete against them, it was a non-harassment bribe.
It also meant that in the next 3 years of Varma’s tenure in Mumbai, ZMI could get away with a lot of irregularities.
DreamToons brought in 3D animation expert Peter McDermott on board to oversee the animation.
In his very first briefing to the spellbound young Indian animators, Peter explained “First thing to bear in mind is to move technically from a monoscopic to stereoscopic scene creation. Scenes have to be thought in a way that is spatial. You cannot leave it to the software to do it for you. So 3D begins with the screen play and ends with the spatial imagination of the graphic artist creating the scene.”
ZMI-DreamToons in a partnership with Intel and HP, had installed twenty-five Z800 workstations with HP Proliant BL460c G6 servers, both based on Intel Xeon 5500 processors.
The new servers allowed a 60% improvement in rendering throughput compared with the previous generation, while the workstations enabled artists to get rapid feedback on effects,
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physics, lighting and other tasks in near real time.
The cost of the systems was immense, but it would be soon offset by the cheapness of Indian digital graphic design labour.
By the end of October 2005, the work on India’s most ambitious animation feature project had earnestly begun.
“My God,” exclaimed Chika six months later, “I thought shooting a film is slow, tedious work, but this is excruciatingly time consuming!”
Scratch dubbing by voice artists were used to get the lip sync of the animated characters. But slowly but surely the movie started to take shape.
Given the tedious nature of work and the maddening perfectionism of Peter, The Legend of Vempalla was slated to be released worldwide in the Christmas week of 2006.
“The best thing about animation is that it is not slave to a language. You can dub it in just about every language in the world without losing its magic,” announced Peter on one of his visits to Mumbai.
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True to his words, once the English dubbing was completed, work commenced on dubbing the movie in 8 Indian languages and 25 foreign languages for a simultaneous release.
Seeing how well the project was turning out, DreamToons announced that the animation feature will not be a one off film but a franchise with the intrepid young protagonist Susan Holt.
Hence the feature was re-christened “Susan Holt and the legend of Vempalla”.
But on July 11, seven innocuous looking men boarded different trains from Churchgate station in South Mumbai carrying cheap nylon bags that office goers usually carried their lunches in. All of them boarded the first class compartments between 05:45 and 06:00 pm and placed their bags under the seats. As the crowd swelled up and people packed the bogies like sardines, the men quietly slipped off the trains leaving their lunch bags behind.
The first blast took place between Khar Road and Santacruz at 06:24 pm and six more explosions followed in the next devastating eleven minutes.
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The bombs were set off in pressure cookers to increase the after burn in athermobaric reaction, more powerful than conventional high explosives.
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