Ananya Ghosh (MUMBAI MIRROR; March 12, 2014)

From making realistic poop samples for English August and shooting against cardboard miniatures for Jajantaram Mamantaram to creating the gritty reality of Black Friday, No Smoking, Gulaal, and Gangs of Wasseypur, and erecting the rusticity-tinged baroque sets for Goliyon ki Raasleela Ram-leela, it seems production designer Wasiq Khan has done it all. Not quite. He has now recreated the largest slum in Asia, Dharavi, for a ghost! Yes, for Nitesh Tiwari's Bhoothnath Returns, he has done just that.
In the film, Amitabh Bachchan plays the ghost and they had to shoot in Dharavi. "We knew that we would not get permission to shoot with Mr Bachchan in such a crowded area due to security concerns. So, we recreated parts of the slum inside a studio,” he says nonchalantly.

 But before that the team shot in Dharavi for three days with a Bachchan lookalike.

 “We mostly took wide angle shots so his face is not visible. The rest of the scenes were shot on the sets with Mr Bachchan in a manner that it all flowed seamlessly. You will not be able to tell the real from the artificial, given the attention to detail," says the man who specialises in imbuing a lived-in feel and texture to the sets he creates.

 A film with a ghost is bound to have special effects, so before preparing for a shot, they had to keep in mind camera angles, the computer graphics (CG) and the post-production in general. Suppose we have put up a window, we need to have a clear idea of what the CG team will create behind it. Many scenes were shot on a chroma background.

 “While working on such projects, we have to be 100 per cent sure about how the final shot will look like and work backwards from there. Every step has to be calculated well in advance. There is no margin for error. It is maths meets arts,” explains Wasiq.

 The friendly ghost is not confined only to the streets of Dharavi. He also travels to Hell and Heaven.

 "Hell was the first set to go up. Sixty per cent of what you will see on screen is the set, and the rest is special effects,” he adds.

 But, for Big B, more than the phantasmagoria of the computer generated graphics, it was Wasiq’s meticulously designed set that surprised him.

 “On the first day of the shoot he took a good half-an-hour to inspect the set," recalls Wasiq.

 "Later, he even tweeted about it saying that such a detailed set enhances an artiste’s performance,” he quipped.