Filming Disaster: The Making of Mumbai’s 3D Disaster Films
Behind the films / Mumbai
Recreating an earthquake, fire and cyclone in Mumbai for a 3D theatre
Earthquake / Fire / Cyclone
Created for a 3D theatre. The films linked here are the 2D online versions.
It Began With a Question
One of the biggest projects I have undertaken, in terms of scale, people involved and sheer audacity, began with three disaster-management films for BMC’s City Institute of Disaster Management & Research Centre (CIDM), Parel. The institute had installed a 3D theatre. The idea was not simply to show students and visitors another instructional film. The intention was that somebody sitting in that auditorium should, for a few minutes, feel something of the experience of a disaster — its suddenness, scale, confusion and physical impact.
My visual storytelling had long been recognised for its intensity, scale and authenticity. In our discussions, the BMC leadership wanted that same impact translated into an immersive cinematic experience for its 3D theatre. The challenge was not to make conventional institutional films, but to make the audience feel what an earthquake, fire or cyclone could mean for Mumbai. We partnered with Optimystix Entertainment on the project, with our team at The Art of Visuals developing and making the films.
I asked for time. This was around 2018–19. For the next couple of months I borrowed books from the BMC library, bought books on disaster management, watched disaster footage from around the world and tried to understand not only what disasters do physically, but what happens psychologically to people caught inside them. Rupali Talan and I brainstormed endlessly. We spoke to people connected with emergency planning, infrastructure and energy, attended meetings and tried to understand control rooms, communications, power failures, HAM radio and inter-agency coordination. The research became exhaustive and mentally draining.
There Was No Ready Template
We searched for comparable films and BMC searched through its own resources. At the time, we could not find an Indian film available to us that could serve as an obvious template for what we were trying to do at this scale. There was no ready grammar to follow.
I realised early that I could not make this alone. We brought in cinematographer Amol Rathod because I needed somebody quick on his feet, capable of moving with substantial cinema cameras and working inside action. For the edit I went to Ballu Saluja, known for films including Lagaan, Swades and Dangal. I knew I would become ambitious, shoot a great deal and then want to keep everything. I needed an editor who would not be sentimental about my footage.
Where Is the Emotion?
At one stage I thought we understood the project. I was thinking about destruction, rescue, things breaking and departments responding. Then Ballu Saluja asked me: where is the emotion? If I wanted the audience to care about a city in danger, I first had to show them a city full of life. Destruction has no emotional scale unless you establish what is at stake.
That pushed us back by weeks, perhaps months. I began listing images that could establish Mumbai: the sea, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, high-rises, slums, local trains, airports, five-star hotels, Bollywood, children playing, families at Marine Drive, beaches, Ganpati Visarjan and stations overflowing with commuters. Some shots might last only a second, but fifty one-second glimpses could create an emotional memory of Mumbai before we threatened it.
I could not keep a full unit on standby for months waiting for the right sky, rain, crowd or tide. So I bought a professional Sony camera, carried a GoPro and began shooting a substantial amount myself. When Mumbai was under heavy-rain warnings and people were being advised to stay indoors, I would often be going out because those were precisely the conditions I needed: high tides, violent rain, fallen trees, damaged cables, flooded streets and local trains moving through a city that appeared submerged. At times I walked through water up to my chest.
When Real Disaster Became Too Real
Fire had already become personal for Rupali Talan and me. About a year earlier, we had been trapped in a fire in our own building. Both of us had fainted and had barely managed to get out through the smoke. We considered ourselves informed adults, yet discovered how little we knew about fire, smoke and how quickly a situation could become life-threatening.
I obtained access to disaster notifications and began responding to reports of real fires. I practically slept with the camera beside me. Sometimes I would hear fire engines behind our building and follow the sirens in my car or an autorickshaw. Then one night I reached a fire around Veera Desai and discovered that children had died. People were crying. The atmosphere was unbearable. The experience affected me badly.
Rupali Talan told me I had to stop chasing real fires. I already had enough material. She was right. One reason I had chased original footage was that available stock rarely looked like India. I did not want an Indian disaster film populated with anonymous foreign streets and foreign fire services. Mumbai had to look like Mumbai. But there was a line, and I had reached it.
Rupali Talan Behind the Camera
Rupali Talan was the Creative Director across the three films. Her involvement extended to costumes, the visual mood, music, grading and the overall look and feel. When we had to cover multiple sequences or work simultaneously, she also directed parallel second-unit photography. Some days we were filming four or five sequences in one location while another camera or unit was covering material elsewhere. That meant maintaining consistency of tone and visual language across many moving parts, not merely supervising a single shot.
She also appeared in the earthquake film as the woman caught inside the collapsing room. Her contribution therefore ran through the development, visual decisions, production and performance of these films.
Designing an Earthquake
For the earthquake film I needed locations, sets, stunt coordination, performers and carefully designed physical events: a road cracking, a pole coming down onto a moving car and breaking glass, a person trapped and then rescued, a home collapsing around its occupants, people taking shelter, the control room activating, and search-and-rescue operations in a genuinely threatening-looking dilapidated structure.
Rupali Talan stepped in to play the principal woman caught inside the home. The fan falls, glass breaks, objects crash, dust fills the space and the room appears to come apart around her. We used dust and injury effects. She was under the table while people around her were physically breaking and dropping things. The environment became frighteningly convincing; some of the fear and tears became real.
Many of these sequences effectively had no retake. We did not have the budget to build multiple identical rooms and destroy them until everybody was happy. If glass was going to break or a structure was going to fall, every department needed to be ready. You got one chance.
Do Not Make the Action a Hero
This produced recurring arguments with Ballu Saluja. If I had worked very hard to engineer a physical shot — glass breaking, something collapsing, an impact — my instinct was to shoot high speed and let the audience see it. I had spent all that effort breaking the thing! Ballu Saluja would say: do not turn the action into a hero. In a real disaster something happens before the mind has time to process it. The audience should almost have to ask, “What just happened?”
Those arguments were serious but also fun. They taught me the difference between creating a spectacular shot and creating the sensation of an event. Disaster does not pause so the audience can admire your filmmaking.
Disaster does not pause so the audience can admire your filmmaking.
If the People Cannot Panic, Let the Camera Panic
Another lesson came inside the disaster-management control room. My first instinct was to ask the operators to look frantic. The Director of the department corrected me: if the city is panicking, the control room cannot panic with it. Their job is to receive information, understand it, route it, coordinate and calm the person at the other end. If they lose control, who coordinates the emergency?
I understood he was right, but I still had a filmmaking problem. This was a short film and every second mattered. I could not drain the pace out of the sequence simply because the professionals themselves had to remain calm. So I transferred the panic from the people to the camera.
I abandoned the tripod. The sequence became handheld and restless: ringing phone, rapid movement to an operator, monitor, another face, incoming information, fast swishes and cuts. The people remained professional. The camera became anxious. It became one of my favourite lessons: authenticity does not always look dramatic. Sometimes urgency has to come from cinematic grammar rather than asking people to perform emotions that would be professionally false.
Fire: Controlled Danger
Fire presented a different problem. Nobody in Mumbai was going to hand us a real building and allow us to burn it for a film. We worked with Mumbai Fire Brigade to find a safe way of constructing a domestic fire sequence: a small household incident, a diya falling, fire spreading and a woman becoming trapped.
I was clear that I did not want actors performing genuinely hazardous rescue work. People entering dangerous environments had to be trained professionals. The casting problem became unusual: first find people capable of doing the action safely; then find among them people who could communicate enough emotion for cinema.
One fire sequence required flames and thick smoke to burst from a window several floors above the ground while the Fire Brigade moved up on its rescue lift. We had planned the action carefully: as the rescuers passed the window, the blast would go off, flames would erupt and the glass would shatter. The principal camera was positioned to see the action from the front. But as the sequence began, I realised it would miss the most important thing for our 3D experience — the glass coming down towards the audience.
There was no time for a discussion. With the noise and confusion around me, I ran below the building and pointed my Canon camera straight up with my 16–35mm ultra-wide-angle lens. The blast happened, the glass shattered and fragments fell directly onto the lens. The lens was destroyed. But we had the shot: glass rushing towards the camera, and fragments that could be experienced in both real-time and slow motion. That was a very expensive few seconds of cinema, but I was delighted we had captured them.
We also staged a car-fire sequence, which introduced an entirely different education in practical effects. A car made safe for a controlled fire cannot simply be driven normally with its usual fuel and electrical systems. We had to learn how to create the impression of a moving vehicle through blocking, framing, lenses, camera positions and coordination with the action and fire teams. The audience only sees the moment. The preparation behind that moment is another story.
The Sea Does Not Take Direction
The cyclone film created perhaps the biggest physical challenge. A large vessel had sunk or partially submerged in the inner bay near the Sea Link after severe weather. It gave us an extraordinary possibility: could we construct a marine rescue sequence around a real maritime environment?
The idea grew: people in the water, multiple rescue teams, boats, jet skis, divers, aerial shots, water-level shots, underwater perspectives and a coordinated multi-agency response. We had teams from the Indian Navy, NDRF, CDRF, Mumbai Fire Brigade and Mumbai Police participating in this mammoth rescue sequence, including a triage area and hospital teams with ambulances on standby.
The people portraying victims in rough open water could not simply be actors. We needed trained rescue personnel. We put roughly twenty or thirty trained people into the water and discovered immediately how different the open sea is from a pool or river. Waves are merciless. Watching rescuers work in those conditions gave me enormous respect for people who actually go into open water to bring others back alive.
We used boats as shooting platforms and improvised ways of getting the camera partly below the waterline so the audience could feel inside the rescue rather than safely on shore. We also lost a drone when it struck something on its return and the camera ended up in the water.
The 3D Problem
For a long time we assumed that because the films were for a 3D theatre, we would shoot natively in 3D with a twin-camera stereoscopic setup. We found specialists and organised a demonstration. Then another part of the plan collapsed.
The twin-camera rig worked when movement was controlled. Almost everything I had designed depended on the opposite: handheld urgency, rescuers moving through spaces, cameras running with action, boats moving in rough water and things collapsing unexpectedly. The technology was beginning to dictate the filmmaking.
Ballu Saluja helped us rethink it. We could shoot with depth in mind — foreground, middle ground, background, movement through layers — and create stereoscopic depth in post-production. That meant substantial 2D-to-3D conversion and painstaking frame-level work across all three films. It was a major cost we had not anticipated, but the alternative was worse: technically correct 3D films that had lost the kinetic visual language for which the project had been designed.
VFX — Only When Reality Could Not Do the Job
I had resisted VFX because I did not want synthetic spectacle. Then I accepted that a disaster film cannot always be completed without visual effects. There were images we could not and should not create practically: damage to major infrastructure, selected large-scale destruction and a road cracking during an earthquake. I decided that across all three films we would use only a handful of major VFX shots.
We found a VFX professional who had returned after working abroad. I told him I wanted physical logic, not drama for its own sake. At one point a treatment came back with fire added to a steel structural element of the Sea Link. My response was: why is the steel itself on fire? Just because fire looks dramatic does not mean you put fire everywhere. Every effect had to answer a basic question: could this actually happen?
Approval created another lesson. In an early version, recognisable heritage structures suffered serious damage. Senior officials objected to showing heritage buildings burning or collapsing. I argued that a disaster does not make such distinctions, but they remained firm. The effects had to be reduced or removed. Even the scale of Sea Link damage had to be toned down. Much of the VFX work we had paid for never appeared as originally conceived. That was institutional filmmaking too: creative realism eventually had to pass through institutional approval.
Sound — and the Things You Feel Before You See Them
I have always believed that sound — and sometimes its absence — can make as much impact as an image. I went to Shantanu, with whom I had worked before, because he listened and brought his own thinking. He told me music alone would not solve these films. We needed Foley and detailed sound effects.
Glass, impact, debris, structural movement, sirens and objects falling were part of making an audience physically experience the disaster. That meant another specialist, another process and another cost. We eventually worked with a highly experienced Bollywood sound professional.
The First Screening
A deadline was approaching. CIDM had to be launched and at least the earthquake film needed to be ready. Finally, it was.
I still remember the first screening in the 3D theatre. The hall was full and senior dignitaries and officials were present. For the first time, everything we had constructed separately existed in the environment for which it had been designed. Mumbai looked beautiful and alive. Then its vulnerability began to reveal itself. The sound became physical. Objects and debris appeared to move through depth. The familiar city became unstable.
People were shaken by it and we received a great deal of appreciation. For a moment it felt as though we had finally solved the project. We had not.
The Slum Sequence — and COVID Arrives
During further approval, the Director of Disaster Management raised another point: where was the destruction in the slums? We had boats, rescuers, urban structures and infrastructure, but Mumbai is also its informal settlements. If we were showing evacuation, vulnerability, shelter and rescue, that part of the city could not disappear.
So we went back into production. At Madh Island we built about five tin-sheet huts, dressed their interiors and created a small market so the settlement felt lived in. We brought huge storm fans and rain machines. We planned people struggling through cyclonic winds and heavy rain, warnings being issued, a man trying to manage his scooter, and eventually a hut collapsing.
By then we were beginning to hear unsettling news about coronavirus and the possibility that Mumbai might shut down. The Director of Disaster Management briefly visited the set while on his rounds, then suddenly told us he had to leave and that we had to wrap up. We did not yet understand the scale of what was coming.
The storm fans and rain machines were so loud that communication became difficult. At exactly the wrong moment, before the principal camera was ready, somebody triggered the hut collapse. The painstakingly constructed hut went down without the main camera rolling. Luckily, a B-roll camera caught part of it. That is what ultimately saved the sequence.
Then the Real World Stopped the Disaster Film
Within days, the COVID crisis transformed everything. The films had originally been imagined for a much larger public life beyond CIDM, including wider awareness screenings and a major 3D presentation. Instead, a real disaster interrupted films about imagined disasters.
There was an irony I could not ignore. During my research I had prepared a list of possible events that could seriously disrupt Mumbai. Pandemic was on it. At the time, it had seemed remote enough to some people to be laughed off. Then it arrived.
The work we had spent roughly a year building was delayed for a long period and never received the theatrical journey we had originally imagined. The films then became part of training sessions at CIDM and were shown to most visiting dignitaries at BMC or CIDM to showcase the effective functioning of the Disaster Management Department.
What the Films Taught Me
The project also taught me something more personal. When you spend months researching everything that can go wrong — earthquake, fire, cyclone, flood, blackout, communications failure, pandemic — you can begin to look at ordinary life differently. Disaster management itself is continuously evolving because the next emergency may not resemble the last one.
But there is a line between understanding risk and becoming consumed by it. Preparedness and paranoia are not the same thing. You can understand a situation. You can prepare for it. You can respect the professionals trained to deal with it. But you cannot live every moment believing that something is about to go wrong. Life has to move on.
The Story Did Not End With the Films
The films were not the end of this body of work. The research, access and visual understanding accumulated during the project later fed into our disaster-management coffee-table book, subsequently associated with the G20 disaster-risk-reduction gathering in Mumbai.
And, despite everything, we made them.
Selected credits
- Direction
- Pravin Talan
- Creative direction
- Rupali Talan
- Cinematography
- Amol Rathod
- Editing
- Ballu Saluja
- Production
- The Art of Visuals
- In association with
- Optimystix Entertainment
- Commissioned by
- Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation for the City Institute of Disaster Management & Research Centre (CIDM), Parel
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