So, what's the budget for the VFX of the film? "I really don't know the details since I'm not the VFX producer, but I was given a commendable budget. In Hollywood, let's say for a film like Transformers, a studio will work on each shot for almost a month. That's the luxury they have because of the mammoth budget they get, unlike ours. If you ask me, the key factor which could increase a film's budget is the number of iterations ('corrections' in layman's terms) each task might have. For Baahubali 2, there were certain shots which needed almost 6-10 iterations, but those were few and far between," he reveals.

Kamalakannan, who's now 57, is content with the whole experience of working on Baahubali 2 and states that it helped him immensely in more ways than he could imagine.

"The learning curve was quite steep and more importantly, I think I've developed a good intuition to judge someone's work. Usually, we end up watching a studio's demo reel and their previous projects, and then blindly allocate the work. However, there's a catch. The VFX artists who would have worked on some of their best works might not be part of the company. So, it's up to me, as a VFX supervisor, to be careful about such things. In the past few months, we discovered a lot of studios which have been doing quality work over the years. For instance, we worked with a small studio in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) and they turned out be really good. Similarly, we worked with studios based in London, Serbia and almost every other VFX studio in India. It really was a big task for me," Kamalakannan says.

The VFX industry in India has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years and some of the films like Eega, Baahubali 1 & 2, Shankar's Endhiran and 2.0 have set the bar quite high. This, Kamalakannan says, has helped Indian films garner attention from VFX studios abroad. "10 years ago, if I e-mailed 10 VFX studios and freelancers abroad to work on Indian films, I would get one reply. But now, I get 10 out of 10 replies (laughs). People are more than willing to work on Indian films and we are certainly going in the right direction," he signs off.