Soundarya Rajinikanth celebrates eight years of Thalaivar's Kochadaiiyaan

Kochadaiiyaan, starring Rajinikanth and Deepika Padukone, which the makers claimed to be the country’s first photorealistic performance capture film, was released eight years ago. (on May 23, 2014) Taking to Twitter, the filmmaker had retweeted a couple of tweets.

The film was shot extensively at Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom.

Soundarya considered herself blessed to have directed Rajinikanth once. “How many people would get the opportunity to say camera, action and cut to him? Working with him once will be a life-long memory,” she said, in an interview. Even though she doesn't deny the possibility of working with her father again, she clarified nothing is planned as of now.

After several days of the release, Soundarya clarified that Kochadaiiyaan was an animation and not a cartoon. Speaking to Cinema Express, Soundarya said, she was proud to say that her debut film, Kochadaiiyaan, will always be known as a one-of-its-kind film. “It will always be my baby because it’s something special. It was criticised overall, and that hurts. The technology was new to people; I guess they didn’t understand!”

Speaking about the most challenging part of directing Rajinikanth, Soundarya told The Hindu, “Well, many times the Rajini fan in me would come out during the shoot, and sometimes, the protective daughter. It was most difficult to split the roles of director, fan and daughter. It was like having a multiple-personality disorder.”

The biggest triumph for Kochadaiiyaan was bringing back late comedy actor Nagesh to the screen. “Even Imagemetrics who did the performance capture for Avatar was amazed because we brought an actor back to life. We used high-resolution images of Nagesh sir, scanned them and created a 3D model. We could get a younger version of him. Since it’s a period setting, we needed somebody vintage-like Nagesh sir. We then got actors who spoke exactly like him and those who looked just like him for the performance and motion capture,” Soundarya stated in The Hindu.

Kochadaiiyaan also featured R. Sharath Kumar, Nazar, Aadhi and Shobana, among others. Oscar-winning music director AR Rahman scored the music.

To a question on how the task of performance capture for Kochadaiiyaan was different from that in movies that have already used the technology—namely Avatar and Tintin — Soundarya said the task she had at hand was a lot tougher. “With Avatar and Tintin, the makers were creating imaginary characters. The seven-feet Naavi or the cartoonish characters of Tintin did not have any real-life references and were completely imaginary,” she told the Hindu.

“However, the task we had at hand was a lot tougher. Appa’s fans know his appearance inside out; they know his body language distinctly and know every scar he has. So, re-creating an exact likeness of his real-life being was a huge challenge. Likewise, for everybody else… be it Shobana or Deepika. They will look the same in their 3D animated version as they are in real life,” said Soundarya.