The Railway Men
About the project
The Railway Men (Netflix, 2023) is a disaster thriller about the railway workers who risked their lives on the night of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, the worst industrial accident in the world.
Based on true events, it stars Kay Kay Menon, R. Madhavan, Divyenndu and Babil Khan as the men who kept Bhopal Junction running as the gas spread. For the title we drew a visual parallel between the Union Carbide plant and the trains, and staged a race between the leaking gas and a train hurtling toward the sleeping city.
Approach
Stark, photoreal; an uneasy, atmospheric realism matching the show's grim undertone.
What I did
The Railway Men title sits in an extremely realistic space, but it still had to hold an atmospheric, uneasy vibe that echoes what the show is about. A lot of the work went into high-res, detailed textures to land that realistic look and the grunge, and into the match cuts that tie the Union Carbide plant to the railway, the valves and pipework rhyming with the train's mechanics, gas and steam reading as the same threat. I kept the lighting dark and grim so it sits right inside the show's world.
The sequence
Credits
- Creative Director
- Jishnu Chatterjee
- CG Lead
- Karan Vanjari
- CG Lead
- Ansh Chandpara
- Compositor
- Jishnu Chatterjee
- Editor
- Jishnu Chatterjee
- Storyboards
- Arkaprabha Dey
- Music
- Sam Slater
Equals
